The Last Sentence

An open window chills a hostel room in icy Istanbul. I work skin taut with fever sleep to wrought iron. I dream of hot Idaho summers, your guitar wood cool brass feel, my mouth around

your name. We live goodbye differently. You learn a new lady named Lexi. You pose candidly with her cats and a red wine glass. You forget about remembering. I am a controlled implosion, an encore

of our last act in layered body role spray I can’t distinguish as blood or war paint. By night, I play the delusional prevaricator for sport, a pious preserver of the picayune, a runaway

wraith shaking Bosporus under my feet, blending grey, dark blue, lights. On a bench, two young men sit and share a simit bread ring. I roam potent with enigma, tread lies you left in me. I am science, art, sex,

criticism, oration, sky, mother. Underneath the eaves of a white mosque, the light pollution city weight, sacred omnidirectional artificial calls to prayer, a pigeon poops white fluid

dried quickly to a green crust. I cusp midnight street corners to empty hostel headboards. I tally mark women who’ve leaked for you against wood firm under pressure. Each count is an irony

I gurgle and swallow: I taste orange sky, rusted brass, lonely poverty, your sinewy back green-eyed flame. My nightmares star Claire’s moans and red hair, the unseen canyons of Colorado, Katie’s long

ebony braids and her large horse mouth. The backs of my eyelids are inked with Lexi’s freckles. We leave goodbye differently. You stay solid in bay glass fractal bedsheet apartments, and I fade.

The tight sunlit and rain-bowed fish market in cigarette smoke streets of Istanbul is my sensory relief. My clothes hang loose, wrinkled from sleep and dirty with time. I imagine our abstract eventual meeting.

You lean by the fish. I braid my hair. You might wear plaid and try to be kind, but the one thing I can’t figure is if our eyes would still wreak havoc on each other. On Hagia Sofia’s steps, I sit bare

and cold beside a woman in burqa. She is a black ghost with fire red Ray Bans. She looks up from her iPhone, a dark cloth smile curve. I couldn’t be your nurse, but I loved you. That is neither lie nor detail.

By a Turkish bath awning, a woman misses her front teeth, a pair of shoes, and the mama of fresh kittens suckling her limber dirty feet. I envision luffa licking the freckles from Lexi’s

white skin. I am calm vengeance. I am a test-tubed tempest of our final act in layered body role spray I can’t decide to wash off or let saturate. I am a slender brown frame in a red

checkered tablecloth, plastic pink shoes, Hanes. I am a vellicated bastille in this blue and yellow hole domed bath pouring water everywhere, scalding skin, pubic hair, stone. The Turkish woman shoves

three English words into my waxy ears, each order an impossibility I choke and then I swallow: turn, pour, relax. She gives no care to my nipples with her rough hands.

We learn to forget differently. I write a poem with no purpose but to say my goodbye. I record the last inconsequential detail. We are trivial because we are mine and we are real

because we happened. Now, I know truth only through the many stories theory like the woman in burqa beside holy Sofia. Now I know truth only through a confused synesthesia. Now I know truth only through

the lick of of Idaho heat, your toe clicking a quickening staccato beat as you came, Blue Mosque calls to prayer, smell of cinnamon sweat, moan, blueberry wine tang, this itchy red tablecloth wasteland!

This is the last sentence I will ever write for you: When only the screen separated us from an Idaho breeze, kids’ laughter, vast stretches of green, your hands and mouth and eyes and center found me.