HAWN FAWN

It is always hot and sunny in Vietnam.  And the beaches are always completely abandoned during the day time because the Vietnamese are a strange people and their wayward thinking drives them into hiding during the days when the sun is out.  Instead, they frequent their beaches at either 4am (no joke) or 5pm.  I tried to do the hip thing and go when everyone else went - I hated it. 

You are the significance. / Plain mouth exerting brute force. / Fiery vocation with caramelized thighs and soft edges. / Gaping holes purged of glory but my god knows your worth. / In darkest night, disrupting endless moments / My tongue spins silk words to blanket shivering limbs quilted from nouns, articles, prepositions. / Even if your face had no name / It would still silence the Earth.

Last month I went to Dana Point with my Mineralogy class to look at the endless minerals found strewn on the beach. We hiked a good mile or two away from the main beach and found ourselves on a beaten path with tall graded beds to our right, and the ocean to our left. If you've taken any entry-level courses in Geology, you'll know that minerals and rocks get eroded and transported via water, which is what we were looking at the entire day. My professor lectured for about an hour, then let us go to pretend to be field geologists for the rest of the day. Honestly, if my full-time job were to find minerals at the beach and classify them, I'd be okay with that. Anyway, theses were some of the things that I wasn't supposed to bring back with me that I pocketed: gneiss, calcitic shells, blue schists, halite (licked it to make sure) with embedded algae, and tons of epidote and olivine.

You belong here, where the mountains, sand, and water meet and align, and the uprooted trees will be our jungle gyms. We will plant our seeds and propagate our lives by the blue-green sea on the verge of the horizon. You will be salty and bronze and beautiful and I will be loyal and light and unwavering.