In Trevi, One Town Over from Spoleto on the Train

Our language still felt stapled to home—that raw rattle and reverb—

it was a foreign season, and time felt audible. The goat herder

in dust with his boom box watched us, lost in geography,

a scorched landscape where the ghost of whatever’s happened

still exists. Our breakfast at corner table lies long behind in that romantic

half-light of memory. The land grows into metaphor, and we stumble

onto an agriturismo whose name translates to cornflower. The couple

by the pool doesn’t look up, and the place is closed to us, that blue

that if we dove deep and stayed down long enough would slow

our mammal heartbeats, gather our blood in what is defined vital,

start saving ourselves, our breaths that we put into a world

that we pull out of. We would be separate—light motes

floating behind our eyelids like silent static.