Porches

Rattle wurring ac box washes over the black velvet midnight, screened safely in and the leaves grazed by moonlight the way ripples knead the shore when the sandpipers sleep in shadows, and suddenly I am sitting in another porch, no lights past dark at the summer beach cottage for the sea turtles are searching their way home and even the glow of mom's cigarette might be the guiding moon, beaconing out into the gulf horizon we cannot see past the screen. A tear in the porch screen of the first house we shared let the dog run and disappear into the black velvet night. We mustn't make the same mistake. We cannot let the things we wish to keep in rush out through a faulty mesh.