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		for M. in Romania Seven hours: late afternoon here, lightning stuttering the clocks, the stunned air a bronze bell one tick before tolling—but already past midnight at the café where you’re sipping vodka with your former lover who’s grown impatient with abundance: the foil-wrapped chocolates, icy heaps of scallops, thousand cereals, & Borgesian library of toilet papers, blue & yellow, beyond wobbly pyramids of avocado in the supermarket where we shop. You’ve mentioned me only once, though smoke-plumes loitering near the stuck ceiling fan assume foreplay in his gaze, so he smudges one last cigarette onto the tabletop. Seven hours: despite this sporadic flickering, I’m still reading—the unsurprisingly brief biography of Luisa Piccaretta, Little Daughter of the Divine Will b. Corato, Italy 1882 d. Corato, Italy 1947 who survived on nothing but Communion wafers for sixty-five years. “She lived in her bed, and died each day. Each day, in order for her to return to life, a priest had to come—usually one of her five confessors— to give her the order to obey him and return to life.” The lamplight fails, then flares. Hummingbird feeders twist among black branches, then dangle like gaudy fishhooks. Your sullen ex watches as you slip two dollars under the empty ashtray, then crumple them back, embarrassed by your mistake, before fingering the still-familiar lei. We tender ourselves to a will less divine, hurly-burly, here & there, floats & solutions. Seven hours: soon you’ll fly west, erasing the difference, cradling in your skirt six hollow eggs, airy gifts, hand-painted for the Orthodox Easter.
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