Sharks in the Time of Saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn

We’d made something, just sitting there together, meeting each other over and over, and now whatever it was we’d made echoed off the streets and buildings around us as we walked, our arms hooked into each other and cuddled so fierce that it was almost as if we’d created new bones that joined us at the ribs.

How many nights did we make like that? How long was I stupid enough to believe we were indestructible? But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight.

We were turning each other into the sort of people we wanted to become, creating the sort of experiences I never knew I wanted until I was having them.

we place the lei in the pit and the soil slides back over it like an eyelid closing that will never open again.