The girl who had two sets of teeth bit a man today. It’s unclear what made her snap but obviously, something had been gnawing at her for a long time. Maybe she couldn’t forget the man who bellowed at her on the street like a loudspeaker to a stray dog. Or that she’d been followed by various men dozens of times and had to duck into corner stores for safety. When she recalls the man in an Atlanta nightclub groping at her chest she feels her jaw crack from clenching. It’s not that the girl is angry… it’s that she’s over it. There’s a saying that goes, “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” If you ask the girl, she’ll tell you that’s wrong. Women are born from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Men are tablets of alka seltzer, they are flotsam and jetsam, they are quick to bite and slow to chew. For Halloween, she dressed up as Calypso. Her favorite flower is a vulva and her favorite exam is the Bechdel test. When I meet the girl for lunch, she tells me about her grand plan to build an underground women’s commune deep within the tectonic plates under the sea. Her teeth sparkle when she tells me about the weight-lifting rooms and the history books, and especially so when she mentions the Lazy Stephens and Donald Downers of this new world order. She even has ideas for a nine-person, all women Supreme Court – hey the girl can dream! But even I know, underneath her excitement is a layer of pain from the years of being told what to look like, and how to dress, and the advances and the ogling and the clandestine photographs taken of her and her sister while riding the train in broad daylight. Things came to a head last week when her OB-GYN referred her to a local dentist. The girl didn’t think much of it but the next time she takes a man to bed, she strips off her skirt and then his pants and feels a quivering sensation inside of her. Before she knows it something between her legs takes a hungry bite. Then his scream of shock, and a crunch that sounds like the skin of a bright red apple breaking apart.

The girl who cries every day was born at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in a soupy town where it is customary to weep several times a day. There, tears don’t drip down one’s face, they undulate from one’s eyes like ripples of rainwater dimpling a lake. In fact, the term “waterworks” was coined by a native ocean-being to describe the all-embodying process of crying these special tears. The girl, is of course, a water sign and this necessarily means she is deeply emotional and always feeling five different things at once. So, you can only imagine what it’s been like for her here on Earth. Her eyes are always ringed with red and never dry. People can’t seem to understand why the girl chooses to live with a perpetually flooded basement, why she prefers salt water to New York tap, how she spends hours studying the spout of the sink because it reminds her of the sea swallowing the river. Sure, she cries every day, but I wouldn’t call her a crybaby… I think she’s just a sensitive soul. I met her on the downtown A train on a stale afternoon in the middle of July… I looked over and saw a few tears snake down the girl’s cheek… she was reading a book the way sea anemones unfurl into color. See, that’s the thing about the girl, she cries because she knows that the most wonderful things in this world exist right below a thick layer of jaded indifference. That’s why the moon will make her cry, the tidepools can make her sob, the way the sun sets so suddenly you almost forget about the speed of time, how the rain here feels like a relatively dry sunny afternoon back home, how Hurricane Harbor reminds her of childhood … I tried to tell her how much she means to me, but this only got her misty-eyed (to put it mildly). When I reached over to hug her, I slipped right off her tear-slicked shoulders and into a lazy river.

I.

Bumblebee and goldenrod,
dandelions in summer and the glaze
over tea-stained teeth. Sallow grin,
ear of corn. We are strong
in the morning, and less so
by evening. I even knew a man
whose mother’s skin turned a putrid
yellow after weeks of dying.
He told me this over breakfast,
Hollandaise sauce snaking down his plate
like a long Hearse. Silken yolk and the
yellowed pages of an old dictionary,
an unfeeling sky holds the moon like
a searchlight. She had forgotten
the last of her memories. At the funeral,
no one could recognize her face.
‍I think yellow is the innocent sun, I think
yellow is a hope, as bright as the end
drawing near. In our eyes, we nursed
timid tears. He took a long breath
and smiled sadly… But, he said…

II.

In the afternoon, we took a bath filled with fire. We
turned the garden into a lemon grove, burnished amber
sank to its knees from the terracotta roofs, suddenly
I dreamt of lakes filled with gold. Summer corn
and marigolds in January, there was no answering time.
You looked so beautiful, like you were in a commercial
for sun, and in the seconds before the sprinkler system
turned on, we swam in flames: quiet inferno of dandelion
and honeycomb, your chin floating in my hands. I don’t
know why, I wanted to ask if you’d run away with me?

III.

After I stopped loving him, his mother sent me
an email. Hello my dear… I found your … while I was …
do you want me to mail this to you? … do you
remember… ? I read her name like a bulletin: one
line in a drawn-out receipt of senders, all of them trapped
in my rectangular computer screen. I hadn’t seen that name
in a long time and I no longer winced like I used to, when
the wound felt like a bite inside a smooth cheek, something
your tongue can’t help but feel. I think she knew that it was
insignificant, whatever she was asking about. Sometimes we
make excuses to catch a glimpse of something, to peel back
the layers of skin, to open a door and find an answer
… I have my own excuses to make, unfastening the padlocked
box and sifting through some of the untouched memories:
the one hundredth morning of the pandemic spent in her
house, while we listened to the news deliver death after death,
and the bees that spring, still buzzing so blissfully, as though
nothing had changed, as though mothers could still hold
their children, as though hope had not been extinguished,
as though tomorrow was still something you could touch and feel,
the yellow bananas each day, sitting on the countertop in
the mornings: always the half left for me from the hour
she was awake before I opened my eyes.