Pacific Moondust

9:12PM. 

Keith wipes down the last table. 

Barbara clocks out.

You click off the Open sign with the sticky light 

and have the bulbs blink themselves to sleep 

until they’re asked again to wake and 

everything feels as though it bathed in the day’s molasses steam.

The fake lilies still flaunt their manufactured wrinkles

and their plastic stigmas wink.

The moon sinks halfway into the sky.

The lily wants to play pretend

but it will always be a Mother,

happy,

standing in resin that settled ages ago 

in yet another vase 

born with the wave of them,

another that rose in an en masse Pacific crossing

but, really, alone to be filled with anything.

My podium will never be gone if it glues me here! 

The lily is trapped in an empire.

Dust magnet.

You grab a napkin.

How annoying.

You can never get rid of that.

I lock the main doors.

It seems to come with the process of wanting.

I don’t wish to be a trouble either so I make way to the back first.

Watch the street logos still sauntering. 

Wait for us to grow closer only how 

the minute hand and hour hand grow close.

Give me something beyond the unclingable clinging dust.

I’ll meet you outside, where we parked our vehicle in the background 

and we forget how long it had been left in the sun 

to melt into a design for a stage,

into a whitewash for an old, unrottable fence 

where the white dried soft like how we think people never do.

I press my fingernail into the shapeable skin and coax it with a dent.

I try to dig out the crescent moon that summits me for 

an unspendable decade called the fingers on the daughter’s hands.

I try to dig out the unfinished process 

and give, finally give, 

the once-sapling its girly stickers.

Was it ever right to wax the waned?

Do you think, like us, it remembers a time when it was liquid? 

Did it learn from us?

To take on the shape of a dead thing standing? 

I run my fingers to test if there is any paint left 

brave enough to still be shaped by a grave digger.

We have yet to jump the fence. 

We’ve been waiting, the fence sinking.

It’s in the ground and it’s gone and

the moon waxes the yard with another ocean

so we don’t have to wait to jump anymore.

If I cross the ocean with you this time,

would you still be scared 

that this raft was made to be a grave

until you said that 

it wasn’t something you could afford?

You ask if I want to watch you drive to back before, 

just for the hour.