He’s made a salad. And I am grateful because making the salad is the part I hate.

Too much intention, too fussy, too much effort in pulling out the sticky drawer to search for a fresh vegetable.

But I won’t eat.

Or, more correctly, the plastic spinner bowl will sit and condense and grow warm. So neither of us will eat.

Because we are fighting.

___________________

The argument starts small, and days later neither of us knows what it is about really.

Yet we do

because the emotions after the fight still cling,

like the white salt that limns my lips after a swim in the ocean.

___________________

A crusty buildup from hours in the surf.

It sticks, and dries and cracks the corners of my mouth.

And on my torso, it chafes under my sticky armpits and wedges into the elastic ruching of my swimsuit.

_________________________

Residue

small price I pay for adventure

Or at least for wanting it.

To swim in the sea that is.

__________________________

In the tide

I flirt with the current,

cresting the shallows.

How far do I dare?

_________________

Quickly I’m nervous

and people wave frantically, from the shore.

Swim, swim

swim towards the danger,

not away, they say,

(defying any logic and intuition).

Let it take you.

________________________

Later, at the hottest spike in the afternoon, I surrender to the outdoor shower

to sluice the brine away,

but I never come completely clean.

My shoulders prick and and sting.

__________________________

And tonight, the heat will radiate and pulse along my entire body,

and the grating scratch grows incessant and insane, and I yank the sandy bed sheets to the floor.

My anger still radiating off of me

in the thick night air.

____________________________

You would think the sun, the ocean, the sky would sift this mood,

but like errant grit in the shag carpet, it’s impossible to sweep away.

The afterburn never breaks the skin, so the repair will be quick,

but tonight both of our backs are throbbing,

angry remnants

as if from a lashing.

__________________________

We sleep (finally),

and dream of silently swimming away from the hurt,

alone or together,

giving up to a salty blue balm of forgetting,

or senselessly letting the riptide drag us away.