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At 4:07 in the afternoon, he spat in the plashets
lining the sidewalks and left.

Thirty hours later she walked to the coast
and her heels ached opulent- little rivers
of red-rain-run-off she moved along with, to the beaches.

Three days into her drear, she poured
what she thought was the last of her purulence
into tidepools; the sand soft anemones and urchins
blackened so sympathetically into masses of wet,
dark threads like his breath in her neck.

On the fifth light, she curled
like charred driftwood and scrawled with the ashes
in the sea; foam and kelp
and dirty grey salt to paint marine
murals on the sand where they used to burn
cola cans and watch the smoke
bind with brisk-clean traces of air.

The estuaries filled with seven days of her solicitude,
and now the diatoms grow in oceanwater like sweat-
all of the gulls rouse at the surface of the water,
like she thinks she remembers his nose against her skin,
on their way to the Pacific Ocean.

It was that night her hips cracked like cowry shells:
the weight of an absence opposing fourteen months'
corporeal cravings and the pressure of his skin.
Cast-away scales of contact dripped down her thighs
and she stands in an oil spill of miserable crux.

The only clean places now
are the sheets that held him cloying and sweet.