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Remnants

Summer heat leaves the house in gasps


Creaks and moans.
Settling into its dirt bed with a sigh
The house sleeps.
I lie awake and listen to it snore
Peering through the eyeholes
—A parasite peeping through a cracked cornea.

Dark silhouettes slice through the silk


Yowling to each other,
Marco-Polo mating calls
That reverberate
Against the blackblue battered skies.

They scream and hiss,


Bite and claw,
Scratch and yowl
—An orgy of barbed spears,
Frantic claws
Dug
Into matted hinds.

The sated tomcats


Slink off,
Searches for someplace to sleep.

My Maggie meanders across the sill.


She slipss through the Maggie-sized opening
I leave for nights such as these
And primps her tussled hair.
The soft grind of her sandpaper tongue
Drifts through the room.

She regards me with those incandescent eyes


Acknowledging the kinship between us:
The soft kicks against my uterus,
The newly formed zygote in her feline womb,
And two months.

Two months until this beautiful parasite


—This lovely leech—
Pulls me apart,
Claws its way into the world,
And squalls like a summer storm.
Born to tear hotly across the beach
And scour the sands that gave it birth,
Leaving a deluge of debris.
A remnant of prenatal beauty.
A whisper of what was
Before the showers of sand
That fattened the beach and
Left it lumped with cellulite sand dunes.

And in an instant,

The storm moves inland,


Leaves the serene devastation of the coast,
And carries within its clouds
Remnants of remnants
—Droplets.
Raindrops ready to plummet earthward,
Ready to chisel at the soil,
Carve the cliff faces,
And etch upon the sand.
Leaving their mark.
Leaving their name.

Tiny toes kick at my insides


—The deep timpani of thunder
Issued from dark wisps dotting the seaward horizon.

Maggie saunters through the moonbeams,


Zigzags toward the bed.
She curls next to me,
Staring up at me
With yellow-green eyes
The color of a coming storm.

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