I am in deep denial about Michael leaving for Japan in 19 days. Michael seems to be dealing with his feelings at least a little more directly in his first poem for the Photography/Poetry Project:

she kicks, legs out on imagined grass
grown over cotton water.
we wash up on the duvet, pursed and pillowy
as clouds hovering over the sharp grey
of rains dreamt
by Northern California fires.

we can’t help but be hungry,
the sweat of a cool night breeze blowing
off my brow, seaside and high like an incoming
tide, puffing sweet white
cumulonimbus into the chasm that heat
has pushed between us.

she closes her eyes, relaxes
the lights of little vectors running
head to foot, and I’m reminded
that I can’t write poetry anymore
but everything is a poet, so I craft the outline
of a passage, a snapshot that asks me
to keep all of this alive
in a mind bound for drowning
somewhere off the coast of Tojinbo.

~Michael Riser

Our mornings and evenings are spent lazily in bed: talking, reading, watching shows…really, just being together.

But for the next 11 months, it’s just going to be…me.

I wanted to try and capture the mood of Michael’s poem and the passage of time that has happened together and that will happen in his absence, knowing that each night I spend alone will bring me one night closer to it being us, together, again.

~Ashley