I am so happily stuck in the softest jaw. Something stagnant in its grip: no threat, no sharp, no broken skin. Frozen like a natural history. A cyclorama tableau, seamless and comfortable.

I am suspended fast in the glassiest eye. I cling to those fragile strings in his watery irises, as if I’ll somehow fall into eraser whites before I swing into his vacuum pupils.

But all this time holding all the stretch, all I wanted was to ease my weary muscles into the resistant push of this Pacific wind. That thirst was for the particular rot of the ocean, a pungent panacea of wilting flora and rigor fauna. The calcification of this stiffening breeze; the muted haunt of a stranger lost on a sinking spit. The anatomy here knows its limits, and has already forfeited to the gravitational momentum of decay. Of course we vacation in the wreckage.

Everything here has been neutered, its volatility extracted and its potential robbed. The wood has burnt, yes, and afterward grown soggy, impotent tidal trails of soot a reminder of the majestic display that preceded it.

I lived in Providence for two full years and never saw the river catch fire, or the changing faces of passersby. The wind there was still too far away. Our bodies never changed. We were bracing for whatever came before the aftershock.

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