You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly.
— Marvin Bell “To Dorothy”

I realised this morning I’d stopped using the phrase ‘back home.’ This is dangerous perhaps.
A dislocation. The way my knee slips and grinds when I step a certain way. The cartilage is receding,
you know. Connective tissue reduced to bone. I dreamt in Spanish last night. Another kind of longing.
I miss the randomness of fresh jalapenos, of what they do to the tongue. You think you’ve escaped
unscathed and one stops you dead, mid-speech. I don’t know how to convey this inexactly. Do I
redact myself?

Very well then, I am tainted by the soft white of revision. I read again and again of soldiers so taken
by the rolling Wairarapa land that they never made it home. Simply disappeared like birds into
canopy. By the time you read this, frost pots will be in the vines, the equidistant fire of the world and
thrum of crude oil staving off another night. There’s little difference between the pots and the
wildfires that will inevitably consume everything I’ve ever known. We hope they will be the last.
Smoke disguised as fog, pulled from earth peeling at dawn.