Flaneurs

Boise, Idaho | 2023

I walk beside those I love 
with a Budweiser bottle and gather cigarette butts
from flower pots, fence posts, from the bottom of their rain slicked boots.
I bear the glass bottle like a sheaf of wheat to my chest.

A paper carton invites fingers and questions of lighters.
We amble about ‘til the transfer of my ember,
lighting yours with my own.
I breathe fire into you and deny the intimacy of this trade.

I watch those I love drop their chins and exhale, some in a quick puff,
their anxious breath confessed from behind gated teeth,
while others in a calm stream of silken smoke.
Both abandon our remembrance.

And I know it’s gross, this bottle, but I love to clean our sluggish trail—
sweep our nescient mucus: my quiet pleasure.
I’ll shake all that’s unabsorbed and extinguish
the remains of our amnesia.

I kiss those I love unashamed of our yellow teeth,
regardless of the grime we touch.
Into the bottle I whisper,
you’ve served me well in drunken word,
and my voice conjoins with the sodden mass of lips met.

Atop a crumbled sandstone wall, I sit and watch the high tide rise.
My ring, silver and ribbed like the walls of a catacomb, slips off into the sea.
It buries deep within the sediment before I can reach it, and it’s gone.
You, you wanderers, you move inland towards the next, and I follow. 
It’s nice to lose things every once in a while,
to realize you’ve accidentally left a part of yourself somewhere.
You’re the collector, you say. And I am.