Theory of Plate Tectonics

She says New England hoards college girls like cherries in its cheek,

tongue-tying legs to knots, making party tricks out of people.

Says it’s an old currency, wads of tangled stems tumored with

unfinished bows. Says the quick ones learn to curl like ribbon.

The brave ones learn to run with their hands. The pretty ones

knot and knot into rope and callus, none of their blood stays long.

But half butane, half lemon juice, all pit, no skin, us sad ones

are a new fruit. I tell her we should shower more. Eat something

besides black pepper and rum. I tell her darling, the teapot’s

melted to the stove, the mugs chipped in hazardous places,

dropped from scalded hands to blades, stealing lips from our guests.

She reminds me we have no guests here, just the half-dead boys

we’ve specialized in trapping, leggy never-giants too grateful

to run so now cups brimming with sliced mouths, kitchen table

littered with scabs, we pick over the charred parts: thirteen matchheads

sawed from stems with his sharpest key (ours now); half a collarbone,

still warm (ours now); the lightbulb he almost smashed into her throat

when he learned not all flightless soft-bodied girls are fireflies

(ours to shatter in the rooftop shadows just like one of us).

She tells me Paris is all glitter and ash this time of year,

red-velvet gloved and scowled. Tells me Cape Town paves its streets with wings

that shimmy for stray coins. Says she’s got a naked man waiting

in Havana and his neighbor owes her seven cigarettes.

She’s been studying plate tectonics. Whispering spells for Pangaea.

Lighting candles for the Great Rift Valley with bootleg magma

from Kilimanjaro. Branding Himalayas to her calves’

Appalachia. Speed testing smoke signals hitched to waves.

She asks me the difference between arson and wildfire.

I say arson is chain-smoking with her Tinder wax doll collection.

Wildfire misusing match blaze as daylight. Should have said

the difference depends on what’s burning. Should have said

we have such old bones for such new people, more cinder than marrow.

We feel safe in all the wrong places, most at home in flames.