stone tabacco

What did we believe in during those sunsets when we stuffed smooth stones between our teeth and lips? I remember you driving wildly into those nights, thinking the roads were extra curved, only to realize later that you had driven through a park playground and up and over an abandoned property overgrown with blackberries. 

It was a place with no roads and I watched your taillights disappear behind a seesaw and I think I saw you spit — out the open driver’s side window — slimy dip spit the color of granite from teeth that were daring the future to break them.

With smooth rocks tucked like so much dinner food in cheeks, it’s hard not to feel like everything is a little dangerous.

You spent the night panicking and then back at the apartment, only to fall asleep draped across the back of an Ikea couch; a bear rug discarded in human form: one nose pad missing from your glasses; you grinned fiercely and a whole river of stones fell from your mouth.

At night sometimes people think the tapping on their metal roofs is seagulls dressed in leather jackets dropping expensive oyster shells on their roofs. It ends up most of the time it’s ghosts of people letting stones fall from their mouths.

Lazy ghosts grinning with novocaine lips.