Lend me a bowl, a body, a home, a city: I’ll fill it with Seattle rain.
Lake Washington’s overflowing; my house is stuffed with strangers’ clothes and cups. Where
            to put 150 days-a-year of Seattle rain? 

In Bateau on Union Street, pretty couples perch on white wooden chairs eating steaks off
            mismatched China. 
Ripples of laughter, clinks of wine glasses through windows splotched with Seattle rain. 

Who doesn’t learn to float in this weather? Who doesn’t build rafts from shreds of soggy
            pizza boxes, shoelaces? 
A single buttercup from a stranger outside a restaurant at night in the cool Seattle rain. 

On the sidewalk by my old house, I try not to look suspicious as I gaze up into splattered
            bedroom windows. 
Dov Bear tugs her leash toward the familiar concrete steps, fur matted, breath wild in the
            Seattle rain. 

At night, sharks trawl the gulfs of California King beds. Squalidae, Pacific angels. 
Shagreen dorsals slipping ghostlike beneath sheets as couples slumber, seeking refuge
            from Seattle rain. 

In the Nordstrom display window, naked mannequins are strung with purses, lipstick pink
            and forget-me-not blue. 
Women slide umbrellas into disposable plastic sheaths as they glide through glass doors
            out of the Seattle rain. 

I call you from the park at Yesler, 5 a.m., soaked and scared: I know we’ve been arguing, but… 
Be an adult and walk home, you say and hang up. I lie on a picnic table, my eyes, my palms,
            my lips wide to the Seattle rain. 

Newspaper boxes stuffed with damp Strangers, wet rainbow crosswalks gleaming  
            like Skittles.
The Girls of Autumn twirling umbrellas in the chorus line of my imagination in
            the Seattle rain. 

And coke dealers peel on dreamboat-speedboats into law firm parking lots, spraying
            baggies in the mist. 
Sometimes there’s no clear passage between day and night in the Seattle rain. 

Red glow of stoplight on the cheeks of a woman hunched alone in a bus shelter, and I want
            to kneel and weep. 
But I keep walking up the hill, cars swishing by through the soft Seattle rain. 

My feelings are just as real and just as imaginary as yours, I text you. 
As Emerson said, “Our moods do not believe in each other,” after months of Seattle rain. 

Remember those young, sacred Sundays: pizza night, slow rounds of backgammon, bottles
            of red wine? 
Remember when we danced through this city, spread glistening for us like the smooth belly
            of an oyster plucked from the Seattle rain. 

And still, Caramel, the bunny, stolid in her little patch of yellowed grass on the street corner,
            waits. 
Untouched carrots and broccoli, left out by neighbors, rotting beneath a nearby tree in the
            Seattle rain. 

I sought refuge, evening electric, in our narrow downstairs bathroom and was trapped. 
Wings beating against walls like a fly in a windowpane stuck between swatter and Seattle
            rain. 

Outside Blick Art Supplies on Broadway, Jimi Hendrix is drenched in blue paint again. 
Kurt Cobain’s plastered on an electric box, sporting a t-shirt that says, “I died for your yuppie
            sins,” in the Seattle rain. 

And on the mud-sopped shore of Lake Washington, runners squish by in fleece
             and headphones. 
Today is sunnier, but cold. I loved you despite your Seattle rain. Hell, I loved
             your Seattle rain. 

this is not right, this is not good, this is not okay. 
Notes to self on phone while crouched on stoop outside of house at 5 a.m. in
             the Seattle rain. 

Night and outside our bedroom window a river of hands, fingers, thighs, toes, fractured
            fibula, tibia, collarbones. 
Everything you try to bury dredges up in the Seattle rain. 

They say the salamander is the new phoenix. She doesn’t rise godlike, unscathed, from the
            ashes. 
Instead she grows back new limbs, similar but transformed, as she slithers out of humid soil
            into Seattle rain. 

Final days in Cal Anderson park, lemon curd-filled donut from General Porpoise, licking
            sugar from fingertips. 
Night and city lights melt across wide, wet slicks of pavement, smears of red, green, gold in
            the warm Seattle rain. 

Do you dream of me like I dream of you? Your Shana, your self-exiled angel of 5 a.m., your
            reckless homesteader, your long burn? 
I’m seeped in you, my door’s flung open. On my mantle, still, a bowl brimming with your
            never-ending rain.