awake in orbit

i woke up in boulder, in the summer, in the afternoon. i got the call. i spoke on the phone. I hung up. all day I could taste the telephone wires. it was like this: i moved through each day. i walked to the coffee shop. i sat in class. i bought beer and i didn’t drink it. it tasted like the telephone. it made me feel the heat, beating. i kept to the cool hallways that went around. on a walkway. in the shade. the bookstore. the phone was hot in my bag. i left it at home. i went to sit beneath the big tree on the lawn. i wrote a letter. i wrote a whole lot of poems, all blues and cool tones. my teacher showed up late to class with her hair wet.
“I was facedown in the Colorado river,” she said.
She was red red red.