Marina woke to hushed conversations from the kitchen. Three voices, including Lee's, all low and serious.

Marina and Lee had lived apart now for six months, she and the girls here in Irving, Lee renting an apartment twenty minutes away in Dallas. He said he had good work there, though never offered specifics. Only on weekends did he stay with them. At first, the arrangement embarrassed her; they'd been married just two years. But she quickly came to appreciate the space it gave her from his increasingly frequent rants and demands.

With fond sentiment

I recall with selective detail

One dimly lit

Night, outside some bottle store

When for the first time I

Felt something different because you

There have been plenty of times when I had to fight for my life.

Sometimes it was for my “health and safety”,

sometimes for happiness.

I fought for what I could not bear to lose,

but I lost all the same. I can still recall the taste of all

those defeats, as bitter as unripe plums.

His hands smell of anemone and mushrooms

on a spring morning.

The sea is flat as he is silent.

He’s a man who deals with silence and water, with

the weight of the stones in his pockets.