At the peak of the summer it makes sense, I have no underwear and haven’t since I got back from school. Meaning I haven’t gotten to the Laundromat. I give thanks to the goddess of bikinis who oversees summer’s peak. I have so many, the tops and bottoms never match, yesterday at Sleepy’s I scrounged and found the fringy Billabong black bottoms from that warehouse sale last year when Walsh was in the town. Far in the back of the trunk. The top was Hollywood red, OP, bought at Walmart one June afternoon in 2009 when I’d left Chesapeake College and drove straight one and a half hours to the beach because I needed to swim. Michael Jackson died that day, I remember right when I got down to the sea two ladies who were strangers read the news off their (then) fancy internet phones and one started to cry. I ran over to them, we stood in a circle and hugged while I changed into my new $12 swimsuit beneath a towel standing on the sand.

The man I most recently have been seeing is vegan. I think about this in the closet scrounging together another set of mismatched bottoms and tops to change for my day. At some point I will do laundry but why when bikinis are The Way. I will get a burrito on my way up PCH and can’t wait. What would he say?

Three work days from now I will be done at my job. This is a prayer to discipline, bikini gods of love and sun, a prayer to the poetry nymphs whose job is to oversee how to be into being, how to yearn into words on the page. This is an act of offering, of moment in-bliss, to show that I am willing to show up again, and get it all down.