By Jessica Watkins

I snagged an indefinite man
Held him outside my apartment
Partly removed from a singles sea, without a ring
Hard into his dirty lone digit
HE DIDN”T FIGHT.
He never quarreled one bit
He held an unbearable gravity
Beaten down and exposed
And typical. Place to Place
His tan body fell to pieces
Like an old stone mosaic
It’s pattern of younger colors
A weathered mosaic
Shades like blooming clouds
Darkening then disappearing with time
He was dotted with sun spots
Little vignettes of decades
And eaten-up
With small dandruff flakes
And beneath one or two layers
Of ridden navy flannels
His lungs sucked up
The tremendous air
-those eerie lungs,
bright and clear of tar,
that stains so
I thought of this plain white man
Held together with hot air,
With little fingers and big toes,
The striking whites and red
Inside his water body
And his bloated kidneys-
Large pinto beans
I LOOKED INTO HIS EYES
My eyes so much smaller
His less deep and more liquid
The pupils framed and matted
With cold blue steel
Brought out behind a Cannon lens
They moved about, but not to look at me
-More like holding something to the sun
I respected his blue face,
The clockwork of his mouth
When I spied
From that dirty finger
(If that could be called a finger)
dark, sweaty, and wielded
two indentions of wedding rings
laying with their knowlege still attached,
a finger still crimped from the strain then a Snap
ah! Some old marriage pings
When he was broken and got away
A proud battle scar
Spanning and continuing
A dimpled finger of personal history
Jotting out from his worked hands
I looked and I looked
And fulfillment filled up
The tiny rented townhouse
My Singles Sea dock
Where suncatchers had spread a cobalt blue light
Bold against the rusted turquoise door to a
brass knocker tinged,
In an ever-growing indigo sky
Banners of bright glass hinder
All the freed men with indentions
The Single-until all
Is blue, blue, blue!
And I let a man go.