Maker’s Mark

In the blackness of your mind she is already on the ground, her warmth piercing the earth’s mantle. Her face grows bigger and bigger as you descend towards her, landing in a spasm that rolls your body next to her.

You can smell her shampoo, or lotion, or whatever it is that makes her smell that way. She looks up at the stars. Her profile is a horizon: eyelashes as distant forests, lips as a sudden creek, nostrils sending smoke signals into the chilly air.

The night sky is salted with stars, as if to season a tasteless universe. Beads of dew hang from pine needles as diamonds without rings. You gave her a ring once, half of infinity. She was nice about it. “Baby,” you say.

The fall splits your lip. A trail of blood eases out of your mouth like the red wax on the bottle you hold. You do this every night: get wasted and black out on the football field behind your old high school to embalm that time when she was yours.

Every time you reopen your eyes the black sky is the first thing you see. To compare, you close your eyes again, to induce a black that is really a billion tiny darkened orange dots formed by your eyelids.

Slow motion chronic blinking: opening and closing your eyes again and again, trying to open them up to the right scene; but the scene never changes, except for the length of grass. You look around and realize you are in field-goal range. “Baby,” you say.

In the blackness of your mind she is always on the ground, and the mark of stars are always etched into the sky by a careful maker who always says baby back.