Sister Dakota

You love someone, so you leave scented candles out (pomegranate, grapefruit), which you might never light.

Flaxen wicks. Burgundy wax. Everything a stageset waiting on your stagecraft.

Enemies? Perhaps. Pop the cork on a malbec, watch your little sister roll her eyes. What is that? No matter. She's beautiful regardless.

Cedar posts and railings redolent of lanolin. Look west tonight at sunset, see the bright handwritten skies choked by gunsmoke and devotion.

Someone spoofed your iTunes, left it channeling. Kicking off the night are Gucci Mane, Destiny's Child, Iggy and the Stooges, Miles Davis, Yeezy, Nina Simone, Sinéad, and Kings of Leon. The good, the raw, the bad, the wired, the ruined, the ugly, the damaged, the misunderstood. Some reassembly required. 

Reminds me. Looking for parts in the auto junkyard, clear-oiled bearings, virgin gravy, constant velocity boots, y'all still slay me. The rains won't likely ever stop, 's crazy. Deep within the dark green wood a cabin, quiet and locked, a woman tied to a chair and recently shot, gouting red on kitchen linoleum while a policeman squints through glass, misses her, moves on. Takes days to die. Has to be cut from her own congealed blood. Happens or not.

Happens. My hands are free right now. Feel them cup your gracile face, lift your caramel eyes to meet my own, see the peaks that haunt my horizons beyond the gentle plains.

I need a passenger like you are craving salvage.

We all here now? Siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts? I'm mostly looking down through black arachnid lashes, so I usually look askance.

I don't even know if I'm a girl or a boy, or even whether that affects our plans. Most likely not; I'm lazy.

We hug the sides of the canyon and walk on, tongues awake to the mineral drip. We battle zero gravity, backlit by black and bathed in frontal sunglow. Before the aurora starts and we emerge from airlocks, exit doorways, tent flaps, orbital suspended slumber.

Myriad gods congratulate us. Replenish our rehearsal with fireflies.

I see you. I know all a y'all. Visitors. Hummingbirds. Vampires. Butterflies.

We come in peace. Receptive. Nothing alien, not even bees. Don't bat your eyes.

My stepmom touched me. I let her. We ossified. Long before we bled we crumbled.

The electric sky dreams color while my bandwidth tunes itself some damn place other, someplace else. We pull over on the shoulder. Watch a coyote slip out on the road and dither, lift its muzzle, catch our mismatched drift, a far-off purple coaldust range proclaiming its own locus beyond our troubled selves.

Dawn still struggles. Bleeds tourist real. Humble. Drums and regalia paint with smoke, smudge a hope, trace an asphalt splash, we stumble.

Pine Ridge. Oka. Standing Rock.

What do I find? This Glastonbury campfire, this huddle. And when? I awake in the backseat, your droll mouth working me, and I stay still. Letting you. Enjoying you. Enjoying you enjoying me. Enjoying me ironically. Consent some dream, some luxury. But I watch the coyote watching us. Dry lightning X-rays distant peaks. Immaculate Coachella. Our kind. We're all so faraway and road blind. Ciao bella, Mariela, we on fleek. You love most of this and so do we. So do all of us, and so iconically.

We're almost perfect till the haters find us, slam into our matchless dry-run moment from behind.