monday

Sitting on a damp picnic blanket with the night sky falling and the grass swaying gently and softly and quietly between feet. To the left, a girl with almond eyes and a boy with pinstriped pants lie face to face, nose to nose, stomach to stomach, a thousand other laughs and wine bottles and plastic wrapped sandwiches forgotten. Their bodies are topography, low rising bumps in the smooth quilt of the park, and in the last of the fierce orange light that peaks between buildings, legs and arms seem to glow. His finger moves slowly over the ridge of her shoulder blade, retracing a familiar path to the dip in her neck that is painted in shadows. It moves up to her chin, rests ever so slowly, then meanders to tuck her hair behind her ear. She laughs, her mind leaping, running circles around the park, her story so full of bright eyes and excitement that she doesn’t notice the mapping of her back, the concentric circles of adoration swirled in perfect succession in the valley between her shoulders.

Smoke billows out from a window high above the park, mothers hug their children closely, people enter and exit the subway, a girl peeks through the eye of a camera, the light falls lower, a black and white movie illuminates just the tip of the noses of all who have gathered. A symphony drifts from the corners of the grass and eases the crowd back onto elbows, sighing and opening their eyes like newborns. In the dark of a summer stillness, a hand continues to trace its circles, the world continues to trace its circles, and I, spinning and spinning and spinning, trace mine.