What mattered in that moment was the heat

of your hip on my palm. Sunlight gilded

the whole island of Atlanta for a few minutes.

We were castaways a few miles from I-75.

Overhead, armadas drifted, white in their ships.

We steered lazily through the rows

of misguided ghosts, white headstones.

You daydreamed past crypts. I asked how

you could miss such massive slabs of marble.

I asked if you would bury me in brick, but

you laughed. We’re going Viking, you said,

we agreed. Burn it all. Everything I have, you said.

What do you have? I asked. You, you said.

Iris burst like cannon fire by the stone markers,

some chiseled as angels, some as crosses.

Crape myrtles, like waves crashing

against the hull of a scow, lurched

over brick walkways briny with moss.

If I listened hard, I could hear oars lowering

into the deep ocean of a marriage, or the moans

of krakens, the lowing of things unrevealed.

Of what we haven’t said. You’ll launch the raft,

or I’ll shoot the fiery arrow. Whichever of us

goes first will never have to admit anything.

Ross White (he/him) is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful things.