The half-built house coughs glass, turning the hillside into starshine.

In the orchard, I whisper stories of your gestures to the apple trees until they dream of a time before the twist, before they hardened in a last knotted flourish to bloom their songs over tart tongues. The branches mutter about the wind’s kinship with youth and the memory of rainfall in the sillage of your voice. Tall grasses gossip about your hands, naming them the envy of whydah tails and widowbirds.

Deep in the woods there’s a dome of switches thatched with dead stems and buttermilk fringe, empty yet eternally occupied, a faint architecture of one who knows the ache of the setting sun. An ephemeral lung, evidence of earthbreath. I crawl inside its tenderness, as if I can live within what lives in me. From here, a tessellation of sky gleams through the curve of your palm and I stake this place home, knowing it’ll be gone in a sigh or two. The shelter’s mouth dresses me in a couture of foxtails. It’s a lost cause– he says, but I feel like a nightingale plucking seed syllables from the darkness.