“I rather laugh off stress than
taking pills” she says,
it’s always because his pants
are too loose for
him to actually be Evan Scott.
The color of his forehead,
is really,
not even a color, it’s the smell
of the sky when it grows
lighter
later and they have to
pull the blinds a bit farther down
for the world grows
darker
while walking around, feeling not quite
solid.

He is the sick taste in her mouth,
slipping from the wet wheels on his
skateboard,
the watering of fake roses
with the remains of water
from the water bottle.
She catches the sadness in her dog’s eye,
the only eye he has left
from the accidental spill of her not-so-strong
instant coffee.
Her carpet
and his mattress
feel the same exact way.
This being noticeable the day
they wore the same colored stripes
across the fronts of their teeth.

“Some people have really bad problems”
she says,
really bad tempers, really
terrible moods,
a lot of girls at CAPA don’t wear socks
with the broken glass on the steps,
how can you not.
The French fry boxes flatten themselves.
They are never complete without
the run over remaining colors
of a clown, he says,
you never know
what he’s about to say.

On the radio, a couple hundred
talking heads sing about
the physco killers
roaming the
same perfectly angled hill
she sits on, waiting for the bus
that never stops
at her stop.
The men who look just like him,
different faces, same exact shapes,
rush past with the broken
fire hydrant water,
a landslide past the streets,
through the woods,
over the sledding gnome mountains,
between the melting bagels.

She takes an extra minute to lace her shoes,
to perfect her un-perfect curls, to hide the albino
spot on her eyebrow.
“The mornings are darker than they were
a week ago.”

And then she left.