The ring isn’t enough. We lie in the afterglow and she says the distance is what kills her. The answer becomes a shared tattoo, something permanent, immovable. She designs a miniature postcard: colors alive in brilliant Technicolor, images from our separate lives, mismatched landmarks and bodies of water merging our worlds. An artist in the East Village tells us the images and color will smear over time. She backs out, searches for a new design. When she asks for my input, I tell her whatever she wants. She says she wants me to have a fucking opinion. I leave again in August and conversations dissolve into platitudes. When the power goes out and the first floor disappears in the flood, it’s too late to tell her to evacuate.

*

When she finally calls from a coworker’s apartment uptown, the color has drowned from her voice. Images form in swaths of gray: the receding tide, the plunge into crotch-deep stagnant water slaked with engine oil and refuse, the emergence into the dystopian ghost-town of lower Manhattan.

In the silence that follows, even her breath goes gray. A stone sinking in the gulf, laden with the knowledge I will not find the words.

# # #

In all, Geoff Peck’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over twenty publications, and he was nominated for Best New American Poets after winning the Thomas McGrath Award from The Academy of American Poets. He received his PhD in English & Creative Writing from the University of North Dakota and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, he teaches Creative Writing at the County College of Morris and am Associate Editor of the Journal of New Jersey Poets. 

Photo: Pam Simon