I am seeing you in the broth again: the best days are rising to the top like good fats and clear onions. I almost bring down my tongue to taste, but I know it will only burn and take a week to heal, feeling numb like static when I count the backs of my teeth walking outside, brisk and alone this month, staying present but losing myself to sleep at night listing those things you might have given me— red stones, the number three, steering— and I feel like a tourist in my own strange city, leaning over a handrail and falling into the tigers to take a photo. I'll risk it to feel a rush of something, but I am not waiting for fruition unless it proves that time is a chord across a circle, or that the half-life of missing you is tonight's long dinner, where I lift the bowl again to my mouth and drink half, then half, then half, so as not to run it dry but instead to forget hunger. I don't always remember. Your house was full of those summer drafts.
