Naples was a heatstroke—everything humming:
cicadas, burnt spoons, salt licking my earlobes.
He handed me a bucket and told me to collect
the broken ones. Shells split like lips. Jagged
spirals. Rust-pink teeth. Veins that pulsed in
the sun’s throat.

The kind you’d never want in your pocket
but couldn’t stop running your fingers over.
He said the ocean spat them out for me,
and I believed him. We beach combed
until the bucket brimmed, until his lighter
ran out of fluid.

His garage—a graveyard for splinters scattered
in piles of sawdust—reeked of gasoline and
crushed Longhorn Beetles. He pulled out a box
with a glass lid. The kind meant for jewelry or
insects. He wanted to trap them again. Even after
they had already escaped.

He wrote me a message in black. Smothered,
we shut the lid, the shells glittering like cheap
crowns.

Now, I imagine his words rotting at the bottom
of his ashes. Maybe the ink bloomed when the
rain seeped in, Rorschaching his lines into
inkblots. I try to picture his handwriting now—
whether his “R” was one of those that hooked
back like a fish caught mid-leap.

White swallowing my eyes. Snowflakes fall
onto his cheeks, eyelashes heavy with frost.
How can snow not melt on a warm body?
Snow turns to seafoam. Saltwater clutches
my ankles. The shore is strewn with seashells,
edges glistening like pocket knives.