Jonathan Barton / She It Was Though

She It Was Though (In Memory of N.B.) Jonathan Barton

The dead send no letters like one, for instance, I keep someplace in a box in the basement, blue pages lined and imprinted, postage comically low, and anyway the currency’s since withdrawn. I remember the way she stood behind the reception counter, gripping the phone with her cheek, stapling the folds of her dress where buttons were missing as I stepped in from the street. How concentrated I was on the beach that day— mild sandpaper of my tongue on the Braille of her freckled skin, the cheap chardonnay. Afterwards walking the water’s loud edge I couldn’t hear the lyrics to the song she yeah yeah yeahed, lifting her arms in copy of the pelicans in their aerial current. She it was I thought of tonight, as my cigar’s smoke funneled into the air of the beach. Autumn’s coming. Cicadas in the dark bushes holding the dunes. Above, only a fragment of Cassiopeia remains, jagged at the edge of the chair she was tied to and held upside down when the heat lightning flashes. The last I saw her, she wore a glossy black wig, her brown hair gone.