My Cardboard Balcony

Stitch by Belinda Roddie Sewed a button on your belly, tightened skin over skin like lapel seduction. Kissed the puckered lips I had made beneath your breasts, licked the licorice biscuit taste away from your orifices. You didn't cry when I fixed you, re-stuffed you, made you fuller and brighter and more colorful in your cheeks, your thighs squeezing the blanket into a snake without hissing, sticking glue in silly places on my spine, slipping a tongue into my ear as I snipped and stitched up time.

He found his life in the simple arts of dipping a stick into watercolors sprayed out in streams in a private river he kept flowing through his bedroom, perched on a bridge that he built from bamboo and stray strings of bark and sinews holding together his dreams on a monument, constantly stroking the vigor back into the walls of his old establishment owned by a father who didn't exactly enjoy the brightness of Picasso or insanity of Van Gogh.