Beds of Rice 

Eggshells falling in the flat night. Eggshells falling in the flat night. Their eyes the flat night of

seabirds. The thieves are stealing onions from the small beds of rice. The beds of rice will

sustain us through these leaves of ache. 

Draw me a bath full of rice and place me in the middle of it, Sarah says. 

Draw me a lake and hold me as gently as an iphone. 

I am the loose tooth in your mouth that you are about to lose forever. 

Loose goosefeathers in the hat of a seamerchant summering on the lake. 

Holding an iphone. 

Holding me. 

Holding Sarah.

Sarah snuck into the cold at night to escape the sun. The desert is in need of rice of a blanket

of a blanket one can sneak into and tumble into a sleep full of tea leaves and liquor. Sarah met

a swan on the bank of a lake and the swan was not her brother. So she returned to the flat

eggshell. Fingernail on the iphone. The setting was a lincoln log cabin in the dark. 

I love you like God loves rice.
Put me in a bed of it. 

I won’t dry up. 

I won’t dry up. 

I love you like lavender. 

Please kiss me. 

Kiss me the way you prune a flower. 

With gentle hands. 

With the kind of eyes that see perfectly color and light and the kaleidoscope that is the sun. 

Sarah said all this. She said it to the lake. She said it to the swan. To all the swans. She said it to Claire.

Claire was a seamerchant. Was goosefeathers. Claire is a grave now. An etching. An etching 

that says 

 always loved. 

 That says 

 kiss me. 

 That says 

 put me in a bed of it. 

 I won’t dry up. 

 I won’t dry up. 

Claire died on the day that they all dissapeared. The whole flock of them. They all dried up. They

all dried up. Into the air. All that was left were hairpins and beautiful blouses. And a pair of

sheer leggings. No time for thrifting. A time for tears. Sarah ripped a page out of the Bible and

tucked it into her shirt.

Sarah ate the sky raw like an oyster. Shucking the sun with long tall fingers. 

Claire and Sarah were moonstones. Sarah buried her stones in the lake. Sarah drank up the lake

with a spoon and thought of her body. Sarah was the light that the lake reflected back even

when it was dry. Sarah’s face in the reflection of a rock is holy.

Eggshells don’t fall in the light. Sarah opens her mouth and waits for the dark. 

Blouses were once bodies and leggings once had legs. They disappeared like the light from the

corner of an eye. Out in the open like leaves. Sarah saw it. Saw Claire shorn from the Earth like

a curl that never drops to the floor. Claire’s head didn’t have curls. It had goose feathers. Sarah

honks geese in the dark. Perhaps they know the secret. Always flying South. They know what it

is to disappear.

They know the vapor of heat. 

They crave it. 

Where have all the flowers gone? Falling among beds of rice. Falling like eggshells in the night.

Claire asks Sarah to draw her a bath. The last supper. They ate rice in the middle of the tub.

Put me in a bed of it.
Put me in a bed of it. 

I promise I won’t dry up, Claire said. 

Kiss me the way you prune a flower, 

hold me as gently as hands on an iphone, Sarah said. 

Sarah did not yet know the sadness of hairpins and blouses. I am the loose tooth in

your mouth that you are about to lose forever. The thieves are stealing onions from

the small beds of rice. Put me in a bed of it. 

Put me in a bed of it, Sarah said.