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How to Leave a Woman Take your name with you into the dust you return to, leaving behind nothing, not even a man-shaped hole. Return the stars to their original configuration before you made the night stroboscopic in the hot hold of mid-summer. Give back her body with no traces of your own. Unspell your name in the freckles of her shoulders and cheeks. Unbreathe your breath from the air she breathes, the sheets, the shadows of her hair. Give back each daydream 
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and wish she spent on you. Return the balance. Redox Behind Beau Terra Eleventh grade, Terry and I, weighted with backpacks and books, stumbled one after another into the red clay gully. We walked in rain-carved pits, stuck our hands out to the sides to steady ourselves, push back from the red-walled mouth of earth. Under a scrappy pine fighting to make green in all that burnt earth,  |
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