i miss The Red House Painters

You can’t ever return.

Coit Tower, 2015, taken by Yours Truly.

For Nick Shaw

Our acrid breath
held the scent of failed reconciliation
My fingers, possessed by a doomed search, scale a neglected atlas
for San Geronimo right after you scoffed and tossed
your damp licorice hair at Grace Cathedral
“That’s what happens when Minnesota,
New Jersey, and Wisconsin make up your entire world.”