how i spent my spring break in one-hundred words or less

i collected your words like they were winning ends of wishbones. i dried them out on the windowsill and i bottled them up in water-spotted jam jars and i shelved them and labeled them and watched them turn brittle and useless as dull toothpicks. you had a laugh like the hands of ghosts, though. those never stayed in the jars very long. they'd creep out under the lid like they knew the process of evaporation better than you did, slip back into me through the backs of my hands, sink into my bones and

stay for a while.