about how the days spiral outward, cooling,

if you don’t show up. Meet me

at Tea Dance, drink in hand, at the harbor’s edge

so we can fulfill our horoscopes,

the back-page kind. Today’s named both of us.

A martini, a card game, chill wave with

one more argument we have been rehearsing

since last fall with this tired Provincetown script.

It’s cold. I have my watercolors,

except they’re just five shades of black.

Distance blooms, pigment blooms,

dries to what we can keep.

___

SCOTT BURAU is a writer and artist living between Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. He was most recently published in the North Dakota Quarterly. IG: @scottburau