Perhaps it is projection, but I sense
a further wanting, a desire to draw
more sap from our forest’s arduous

oaks. I lay there floating in the pool
beside you under a cavalcade of

stranger stars– this list of hauntings,
these strands like violins shrill
across the night, complex

distractions when we could be
arm in arm and weightless.

(originally published in Z Publishing’s Emerging Pennsylvania Poets Anthology, Summer 2019)