astray raze i stood outside her house, white and blank like the face ten years of nothing gave her. i watched her park on the street, piloting a white sedan with curves that dated it to the last years of my youth. she climbed into a black suv. some man i'd never met drove her away. i watched her disappear from the other side of a window that let my feet see straight through the painted box that held her while she slept. someone who lived on her block passed me on the sidewalk. "you cleaning the street?" he asked. "just eating peanuts," i said. i stared at the street signs. blue and bent and bereft of any useful information. i thought maybe she lived on a boulevard named for a french statesman. maybe that was where i was. i wanted to be able to retrace my steps. to come_back when she wasn't being taken away from me. i turned around. tried to memorize the numbers above her front_door. i found a book of poems on the ground with a title i didn't trust. near the end of a cul-de-sac, the ghost of a chef who hung himself when his desperate love went bad stood and listened to twin brothers talk over each other. a pothole full of lukewarm water dared me not to step in it. the dead man's hair changed from grey to black and back again. one of the brothers asked me who i was. i told him i was just a guy who didn't know where the hell he was and got lucky enough to catch part of their conversation. he said if i kept walking left there was an artery that would lead straight to my street. the ground beneath us was a plate with a piece of fish on it. breaded and broken. salt around its varnished skin. i could taste it without touching it. i walked under a bridge and onto a highway, moving with the flow of traffic. i read some words from the preface to a memoir that hadn't been written yet. "my tangerines have names you've never seen, but i've kept them all. you better believe i love my wild." i never found my way back home. 231226 what's it to you? who go blather from