scutum

The water streams down their

transparent shower curtain to the subway tile:

                a kind of miniature Pont du Gard. 

She puts the pillow defensively

between her legs

when they face each other on the couch,

it reminds him of

ancient Roman warfare tactics:

                the shielding of verbal arrows. 

The divisive borders

she creates with in distances:

                as impenetrable as no less than eight of Hadrian's Walls,

                layered vertically into brisknorthern dampness. 

It is this grand, this decadent.

               

—My parents are snowbirds.  Whenever they travel to Phoenix, they each take a set of funeral clothes, he says.

—What do you mean by funeral clothes, she says.

—Black clothes, you know, in case someone dies while they are spending the winter down there and they have to travel to a funeral.  Usually, they just wear shorts and leather sandals all day, he says.

               

She nods.  

Behind the hearth,

the planks crackle and cackle beneath

the numbered tridents of flame.  

She squints into the heat, 

prodding the ragged beams with the antique poker, 

its handle spewing curlicues of a primeval simplicity.  

Then a rustle of shifting sparks as she spears

the porous ballasts; the spongy, carpenter-ant-eaten posts

buckle and tumble into the dripping maw of fire.  

Everything is V-shaped as it collapses into itself.  

A miniaturized disaster

that is all

angular and tepid.
               

Before the fire, on a square plate,

he traces a trapezoid of flatbread

through a slough of olive oil.  

Carving some sort of illegible numeral into

the saffron-tinted glue,

he averts his eyes away from the blackened grate.  It reminds him too much of the

ethereal existence he Elysiumed through before she arrived,

trails unblazed.

—Look at this, she says.

Her palm spreads before his face,

four valleys of suede webbing

between

five embers of velvet.

He refocuses and he looks.

The poker handle has tattooed its cursive curves into her hand,

adjoining smooth linearities of innate palm-grooves. 

Etching a new design, a new blueprint for

back-alley future-readers to hunch about, baffled,

into the enormity of her infinite possibility. 

She traces the lines before they disappear.

She widens her eyes like two watch faces,

like a pair of undone camera lenses

and her mouth opens into a half-dollar sized hole.  

He quickly cylinders the flatbread shard and,

with her splayed palm still before his face,

shoves it into the hoop

formed by her fireborn lips.

The Dorian columns of air around their heads begin to crumble

and he remembers broad waters

the color of unkilned terra cotta.  

Mountains rising in skewed depths of field.  

A brown horse nipping the flank of a white one.  

Everything covered in dog hair.  

New batteries.  

Croutons.

Unexpectedly deep voices.  

Industrial fan blades of buffed steel.  

Underrated establishments.  

Pebbles.

Conversations skirting the real questions because they lack the real answers.  

Those soft Japanese pines.

Ten miles of hostile potholes.  

Her face on his phone.  

Backhoes.  

Sunpatches on saguaros. 

Lackluster performances from groundbreaking gadgets.  

El Nino’s sideways rain.  

Palmetto shreds.  

Subpar muralists piggybacking Ming Dynasty finery at a museum.  

Headlines read aloud from across rooms.  

Impossible climbs.  

An irritable longing pacified like a Germanic tribe.