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“You look like a city girl,” he said when I returned to the airport in my hometown.
To this day I don’t know if I was faking.

“Get out of this town or get pregnant,” she said,
and I fled like a bird in the sightline of the first snow,
but it’s 10 AM on a Tuesday when I get the paper pharmacy packet,
and it’s 10 PM on a Sunday when I realize how empty the bottom of the world is.

He wants to live by the ocean. I already live between continents,
draping foam-capped waves around my shoulders,
scraping the sea bed for transpacific cables and reading
sonar vibrations against my skin like a heartbeat.

Walking the breakwater, a stone crescent moon holding back the tide,
talking to a young man with a fishing rod and a muted sigh
because neither of us found what we’re looking for
amid squawking gulls and the snap of rigging in the marina.

My father tells us how to find the space station as if we could search together,
but he asks if I can see the southern lights while the sun rises in the north.
The photo shows four people on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I am not one.
I stand at the edge of the Mariana Trench while the abyss gazes into me.

A compass is useless. Down here, everything is north,
and this time he won’t be in the airport to welcome me home.