Last night,
my friend jill and i rode our bikes to the beach
to watch the quiet summer lightning.
It lit the clouds like lanterns
or jellyfish
like life inside lungs,
heart inside skull.

We sat in the empty lifeguard tower
We pressed against the walls to evade the flashlights
when the cops came
to yell the beach was closed.
We ate homemade applesauce from a jar.
We talked about our lives.

And we said we didn't know the name for lightning like this
that went on and on.

When i was a kid
i didn't have words for the tar
that washed up on the beach sometimes.
But it seemed perfect and natural that the sea would give birth to
such darkness.
I would scrape it off my feet,
and marvel at the strangeness of this world,
the mysteries of ocean.

Giving words to things
is almost always a losing,
a giving up.

We talked,
the storms inside me became words,
and i became carved out,
hollow.

I could be musical instrument,
a noisy emptiness.

When i went home, the nightmares came.
they will stay for weeks.
i wake up and know there is someone dangerous in my house again.
i tell myself it doesn't make sense,
But i am hollow,
and i have no doors to close.

When i am terrified like this,
i like to imagine roots growing from my body down into the ground,
but maybe my terrors and aches are already part of the earth
and its cycles,
the mysteries that live inside it,
like oil and tar.
The moon pulling me up,
like water,
into hollows and canyons.

And maybe, outside my curtained window,
the sky is still lit like a house that is safe,
like a life inside skin
like a song.

Sometimes, i am happy,
a bell.
life hums against my skin.

But then the nightmares come.