Someone asks: Do you think of yourself as a generally healthy person or
a generally unhealthy person?

Someone else replies: I don't think of myself. But I think of you, and I think
you  are a  generally healthy person.   That's why sickness  hurts  you the
way it does, why it fevers through you  like a parent who thinks  shaking
the crying child is the way to make it stop. You're  generally healthy how
I am not generally anything.  Thorough.  Resolute  though  not  resolved.
It's why  you can  never leave me, you know.   I  shouldn't  say this, these
words wound up always the wrong way but  you started me: you cannot
leave.   People tell me  to go out,  tell  me to get  a  life.   But I  have  a life.
You.   My generally healthy heart  who is sick and still  looks beautiful in
the dark. I know what I do. The cling-clang factor of cuffs shaped as only
small hurting animal hearts can  manage;  I know.  I obligate.  I cry.  I ask
for more time.  And I am sorry for  this. These. The words and the silence
mitigated  solely  by  books and worry and books and the 5AM sob sleep
soon becomes.  I am sorry.  But I'm grateful too, and if you happen to be
the surest  part  of who I'm not, well, I admit I'm too coherent to pretend
I can pretend myself out of breath. You cannot leave. You can't. You can.
You  won't.  Because you're good as well as healthy. Your heart takes up
entire  worlds where safety lets itself be found. You won't leave. And I, I
sit on the edge of doing one good thing every night. I sit. I kick my feet at
its opportunity.  One good thing won't mean goodness.   Won't make all
that borrowed lenience strike even.  I kick.  I cry some more. You cough
a death sound and I listen: my ear the eye to your livelihood. When you're
sick you don't talk in your sleep. When you heal the whispers return and
sometimes I respond. Yes? What? Okay. Okay. Okay. Good night. Good
night. Good night. Generally healthy. I hold your hand from one room over,
waiting for the morning already happening somewhere else.

          (s)he can't remember a time when
death was not preferable;

                              sh(e) can't remember.

When your heart firedark
threw in with the earth
to banish the sky, there
left an excess of you
though you did not know.

                   I did my best to hold the overflow in my arms.
                  A fast hand necessary, you make me greedy or
                               greed makes my natural state wherever you are
                               or love is just always misspelled: two false starts.

However you swallow, I did not want you
even your discarded parts, carried home
with someone else. Your forgotten days,

                your attic-eaten books, your ill conceived
                collection of dangerous things, your once

favorite sweater with the unraveling hem,
your piano, your boxes like nesting dolls,
your empty space. I tried to hold.
                               I did my best.

Still, there it goes, three corners too far out ahead for me to ever catch
                                      up to, but close enough to see and keep trying:
your scarf tails tattered with running towards away nowhere on a map,
firedark with    Been Here Been Here Been Here and
                                                             I Don't Want to be Anymore and

a polaroid in the lining of my favorite coat:
sunrise on a gray beach and
all the words you left for me to watch it with.

                            We are who we aren't
definitions shaped
then reshaped and still
no land is our land.

I try to spend my time wisely
                    because you gave it to me
when I couldn't afford it alone,
but I've always had more wist than wisdom.

People look backward and I don't know
how they do it, how they manage not
falling into traffic or city sewers, how
they stare long into the half dark and
cry with their fists or their teeth still somehow
alive at the end of the night. I don't know
how they do it, but I do it, and then
morning watching itself knot into a stranger
trying to remember how to be familiar
with a heart that no longer offers its hand.
And that's something I guess: that I
wouldn't trust me -- as the saying goes --
as far as I could throw.

(Just as well. I'm a lousy shot anyway. Broad sides of barns don't count for comparison when it's the space beside me I keep missing.)  

You have this open marriage with papier-mâché
chewing things down and giving them second lives;
                    they really don't know how lucky they are,
pressed back together in a web of deft fingertips.

The joke is a bad one, that you build and I break.
Not destroy. Destruction necessitates a degree of
certainty I can't even pretend at. The joke is bad.
But it's also true. In your sleep you dream and
when you wake you don't remember but you
talk in your blankets (did you know?) and some
of slumber clings to you, dust motes in a bright light.
I'm jealous maybe. Your smile, unafraid to show
all of your teeth, unworried; people know without
knowing you at all: you would never hurt them.
You would not be the mouth or the throat looking
to swallow everything in a hurry just to keep it;
you would not let the backward glance move in.
 
(You could; you're nowhere near harmless, but the thing keeps being, always is: you wouldn't. You just wouldn't.)

From the roof the sky is our sky and from
the ground it waves blue good-nights,
waiting for us to go inside where it's warm where it's home where it's a juggling act of intent and result where it's ours even though even still
                                                                                 we are who we aren't,


negative spaces where our ladders used to stand.

there is something abusive about
feeling
one way
all the time;
unsafe in safe places
sad in the daylight
the corners of your eyes
filled with shadows.

the writer we love hangs himself
in the basement where he knows
his wife will find him first

years pass

one day between updates and
backward glances my mother
asks me if i know why he did that
if he loved her, why?

i tell her i don't know but
i think when the whole wide world
never stops seeming to bare its teeth
what you want is a safety

the basement of his heart-match
dead weight in the dark knowing
that was the one place he could
do anything
and still be loved

i picture it often, overstep my
boundaries and pretend the
itchy fray scrapes my throat
(again)
my hand curled barely full
around the braid overhead

maybe i was wrong

it never feels safe
but then again
i have no basement to do it in

Growing up, the grove meant safety, threading its embrace with sunlight and sea water.
I remembered this when reading her name. Soto. Add a 't' and the emphasis falls down.
Subtract the first 'o'. Then we know what she did, and it doesn't matter it's missing a letter.
Hide, stow, fall. Quiet words, they only want to keep small hearts breathing in the dark.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Victoria.

 Victoria.
The queen across the water or the hand holding you up while you learn to tread water,
she knew how to keep a secret. She knew what to say, the time then nearly up.
Over there, through the wrong window: love made into a woman suddenly falling down.
In closets, in cabinets: minds trying to believe good prevails, even trapped in the dark.
They try to remember how to spell words seeded in desperate magic, falling shy one letter.

Agents felled in the line of duty get stars. I would rather name one for her, love letter
to a woman I never knew through a handshake and didn't need to. I know Victoria.
Lifetimes ago, she was marked by a half moon, a searchlight circling in the dark.
She reflected its sky in arcs, not the stone but the ripples rearranging blue water,
rearranging light. Explanations exist but fall short. Some truths get written down
a hundred ways and none of them come close. But I feel I knew her: out, away, up.
 
Maps don't account for the geography here, the tendency of some up
then downward travels repeatedly represented by the wrong face, a letter
left in the wrong hands, or a life cut out too soon. Again I write her name down:
Victoria.
Again it isn't enough. Loss of a stranger is dangerous water
and I don't know how to swim anyway, but here I try: ocean bright or sky dark.
 
I don't want to lie, to pretend I knew her favorite movie or song to listen to in the dark.
But I still feel I knew her other ways, feel that anyone with hands thrown up
to catch hearts, to bring them home - anyone who has done this, knew her: the land or the water
carrying small bodies to safety. Names have power but not names alone, not the letter
written to her family because we are helpless to do anything else for Victoria.
We say we won't forget but when it's our turn, all we can say is at least it's been put down
 
in this way too, in any way we can, while someone else out there does it better (we hope.) Down
beneath our ages and actions, we strike fires much the same, chasing off the dark
the only ways we know how: by those routes, roots we don't have words for, for Victoria,
for lives lost and saved in the same shaking breath. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
the magic word, the invisible armor, the stronger body bearing its bullet as Morse code, as the letter
which said: love won out, wore strong, walked across the water
 
fear and courage with their arms around each other, whispering "When we grow up
we will remember how it was to be small, helpless, and protected." Inking one last letter
to send where we finally meet for real: the land of sky, giving goodnight kisses to soft water.

I.

Rosie is moving away. She hasn't told me this, but I know it's true. Rose is moving and never coming back.

I've tried to talk her out of it without actually talking her out of it; if she knew that I knew, then she'd leave even sooner and that would be that. I've done my best to be subtle, which just means I've tried to say it without being too direct. Instead I've brought her things: cobalt sea glass, her favorite chocolate, a mixed tape, a posy of marigolds. Anything else? Well. I've made it a point to tell her about my day. That gets her attention for a while usually, because she knows how much I hate talking about myself. We have to be doing something else at the same time  though –  crossing the river on the dead tree, bicycling home from school, sitting on the swings or the merry-go-round. Anything. While we sit or cycle or walk, I can tell her the truths I've always kept from everyone else. We can sit and kick our legs out and sometimes we even laugh.

For a while, I've been under the impression that I'm getting through; someone else needing you is surprisingly powerful, and we both know that.   I mean, I kind of understand where she's coming from. Sometimes I even feel like I'm in the same house as she is, like I'm hiding the same things. And, really, I know this is the truth: if I really wanted to move away, no one could stop me. Rosie says that's why we became friends - why we've been friends all this time, why she rolls her sleeves up when only I can see what's there: modest scars, and sometimes, finger-shaped bruises.

She says other things too; she says she loves me, and I want to tell her you don't leave the people you love on purpose, but I already know that's not true either.

Dad left. And he loved us. Mom always says so, anyway.

Rosie is beautiful like a good book. The more you read her, the more you love her, the more you find there. That's been my experience, at least. Based on the people who watch her, I think I'm not the only one who sees that. On the first read you get the basics: only child, working-class family, red-haired and blue-eyed, surprisingly strong. If you read her again you notice: Rosie doesn't like a lot of things. Rosie doesn't do "like". Rosie loves. She loves animals, and she loves sports. She loves storms and silent films. She loves the playground with its rusty safety-hazards of equipment. I used to think Rosie didn't know how to like anything, that she could only love it, but now I think she has just never been interested in the word "like" to begin with. To someone of Rosie's kind, to "like" seems halfhearted, so she opts for love.

Being around her makes me feel bad sometimes. I told her once, and she said I shouldn't be stupid. We didn't talk for a week after that, and then when we did start talking again it was without explanations or apologies. It was as though we had some silent agreement about how we missed each other and how that alone was enough of a reason to magnetize back together. Rosie is so alive. I have always thought this, and a year ago that would have been the thought that sent me into tantrums of jealousy, bitter that I had to aspire to be like someone the same age as me. What made her better? It wasn't that I didn't know; it was that I very much knew, and the list was a long one. I don't know for sure if I told her this – in detail or in that vaguely hurried, confessing way –  but I have a memory of crying; I think – I swear – Rosie was there and listening to me, brushing my hair back. I think she understood, that time.



II.

Rosie is moving away and there is nothing I can do about it.

No one else knows. They don't see the way I see. I guess she isn't eating much, and I guess she doesn't smile a lot anymore; but when I point this out to a mutual friend they just tell me I'm seeing things that aren't there. Rosie is a very active person; of course she's on the lighter side at the peak of the season. It's senior year, and everyone is a little grimmer around the edges, so to speak. Don't be such a worry wart. That's a favorite people use on me all the time, but they use it so much it bounces right off of me. I continue worrying. I can't help it. It's not just how her clothes hang off of her bones or the number of times I catch her hands shaking too hard to hold a pencil. It's not just that. In fact, I might have to punch the next person who starts their response with “It's just...” because it's not. It's…everything.  I don't know how else to put it. But no one believes me. Rosie has every reason to be fine, so she's fine. Everyone tells me. It's unhelpful enough that I stop asking what people see when they look at her. Maybe they don't see Rosie herself at all – just what they think she is, or what she should be. Whatever's easier.

Recently I sat with Rosie in the playground. She was at the top of the slide and I was at the bottom, facing up at her. It was nighttime, too far away from the streetlamps for any real light.

At some point, I told her, "I'd be dead without you," and I meant it.

"You'd be fine." She had her dark blue jacket, the hood sloping down over her eyes like low-cut bangs, and when she smiled I could barely see anything but her teeth - the white sharpness of them.

"You don't know that," I said, unable to say what I meant to say, which was: don't leave. Stay. Friends don't leave each other. You're a liar Rosie Jennings. You're a liar and I hate you. You better not leave.

And... I'm scared. That was what I wanted to say. Well. Some of it.

"You'd be fine," she repeated, but I thought she sounded a little less certain.

I hoped she was.



III.

Rosie moved a month ago. She sent me a letter. I guess she posted it right before she left, because I got it the very next day.

It has no return address but I know where to find her.

When I go, I bring with me: cobalt sea glass, her favorite chocolate, a mixed tape, a posy of marigolds. I tell her about my day, and I tell her what an awful person she is, how I'll never forgive her for moving away and how because of that I'll never forget her either, which is confusing. I sit with her until it starts to storm.

"You planned this."

It's supposed to sound accusatory but it just comes out sad. I don't know anyone else (I've never known anyone else) who could make me as sad as Rosie.

Or as happy.

I don't say goodbye. I just leave, wondering how I look to her – if she sees me at all – with my hands shoved deep in the pockets of her dark blue jacket. Years from now, the late winter rain thieving down the back of my neck will be the first thing I associate Rosie with, strangely like her in retrospect: honest and waiting for no one, inevitably falling down.

You did not expect him to be what he was:

        bare inches of a storm you coughed up,
               bared bones of a skeleton you clung onto,
                         barren land trying to make the sky blue
                         barren land trying to make the sky blue
               bared bones of a skeleton you clung onto,
        bare inches of a storm you coughed up

the shape of something forever on its way.

You did not expect it,
         the fever eye of what the open window let into your home
                          not the storm you had asked for, the rain only acid
                          refusing to drown, preferring to devour as leftovers
                          as instinct.

You did not expect him 
    beautiful boy maybe                                 
    bad for everything
    around him

    but better than you.

Bared bones said hello when no one wanted to hear it
and bared inches threatened slow death the way you always wanted;
barren land still didn't have any room for your body
    much less your voice, your residue which never could be anything but a struggle.

Still, you did not expect him
recurrence
shadow at the back of your skull
pressing
words as dead flowers,
for keeps.

Once you invented a hospital. Some of it was true -
- the dark, the sound, the faces unrecognized.
He was there too, sat steadfast holding your hand
like he wanted you to make it, saying love and talking
about going home. In your head he told you to think
of the needles as stems of the flowers you loved, to
imagine they love you back just as much.

It was not until later you knew.

He didn't mean the flowers
and the chair was empty.

Lucky isn't it.
You did not expect him anyway.

                          she wrote them a letter
   promised to get better
   was found one day later
                                   blood red in her sweater
 

"Don't look," you said, so I looked.

Found your stab wound beneath a dozen records you'll never listen to.
The blood an inkblot from a pen your father gave you, boxed in by bedsheets
your mother bought a week ago, a few post-its. Recognized her handwriting;
recognized better how these people beat themselves into every part of you,
even your words. Especially your words. Remodeled bones who never saw a doctor,
remodeled kitchen your mother threw her teeth into like a last meal, remodeled future
you had the good sense to dive out of. They owned you always, hands on your shoulders,
eyes on your crown, all their good parts siphoned off into other versions of themselves:
paper dolls. And even those did their damage.

Your mother says it's my fault, but I don't believe in hitting
if I don't have to. She says it's my fault and lets me in anyway, sends her eyes after me
to stare over my shoulder into your room; I guess that's as close as she's ever been.
Unkind? I don't care; I'm only here to take back of you what I can. Maybe she knows.
Stepping into your room, I close the door with my foot, drift to your window where you stood
three days ago, talking to me with flashlight signals, trying to tell me how lonely you were,
how you fit into the puzzle but never into place. How you loved me anyway.
If that was okay. How even if I loved you back
it wouldn't be enough.

I do love you back. I love you front. I love you underground
though I can't reach you there without breaking at least three different laws.
"What do you know?" Your mother spits the polite sort of prejudice. Not about skin.
Might be that I'm a girl. Hard to tell. People keep saying you did it for the
wrong reasons. Why not bare your scar? But I know; you were more the bearing kind.
The letter under your records and the dust stowing away on my shirttails and the
cold aloneness of the sun through your window. These were not wrong reasons; they were just
reasons. You know you don't have to worry. I can't keep a secret to save
my life, but I'll keep this one
trying to remember yours.

We look better when I sleep. Sometimes you are so old
I barely know you. Laugh lines. A few more scars. Evidence of
someone who let the wolves in your room once. On purpose. But it's you.
Moonlight though, so I know even asleep: this is the age under your bed.
Anyway, you're in your nineties I think. I'm braiding your hair impossibly small,
adding Baby's Breath and calling you Your Majesty. I sing you lullabies,
not because I'm good but because you ask. Then I blink, drop years
like accelerated weight, the body thrown into zero gravity for an hour. You too.
Beneath us a rickety bridge that smells like summer even in December,
beneath us the trickling stream saying it's actually June,
the fireflies concurring, your pudgy elbows,
my stick-bug legs, the swell of your face,
the blood on my back - things
we both thought we could handle. You mimic the rickets and I
mimic you. We laugh and look better until it's time to go home.

This room is a mess but mine is worse. Yours resembles art.
Mine suggests an inability to let go. Being here doesn't help my case.
Here, your flashlight. One of those slim, metal ones with the trending
bright colored exterior, heavier than expected, batteries dormant down its throat.
Then not. Off. On. Off. I slip it into my bag with: your letters, your camera,
your first three bedside books, your blue shirt more hole than shirt, your glasses.
Broken. (I remember we tried to fix them.) I can't fit the records. Now
no one will listen to them. I wish you were the kind of person to keep a journal.
Selfish me asks why you couldn't let me have that.
Too easy, you might say on a mean day.
Too much, you would say on an honest one.
Nothing else to do here but I sweep through again just in case.
Not an afterthought: I turn on your nightlight before I leave, and for a minute
you return in the lights on your walls.

I keep promises better than secrets. Your body will grow an apple tree
and I will live in its branches, tell you stories. They'll really just be me talking
about my day but how else would you know? I'll tell you other things too:
how they made Pluto lonely like you, how the people we should have loved but never met keep dying,
how some days I hate you because you never learned to talk back. Then I'll read you stories,
which is different from telling. (We talked about this.) You will have to deal with
my Hemingway moods and seventh childhood, but it won't matter. All these have the same end.
In your tree I'll spend hours memorizing constellations with one of your books.
I'll swear to name one for you if I ever have the opportunity.
Before the tree there will only be roots. Seeds and roots. Seeds and roots and bad days,
bad days that are long days made of trying to understand the emptiness to my right.
Give me your hand. But you can't. Won't be able to. I'll understand but sometimes
it will rain and I won't be as grown-up as we both wish I was. Sorry for the screaming.
Sometimes I just can't stand you. My first broken part will come from forgetting small hands
always lose to headstones. The rest won't seem as important - proof you'll still be there
for the big things. Firsts. Lasts. The teeming in-between. And someday apples
falling like hearts where you're sleeping.

This town hates sadness so I stay out of its way. It's fine.
It's all
fine.
Even gone, you're still enough for me.

You told me you moved past it
I went into my room
I closed the door
and thought about the kind of motion necessary
to sound the way you sounded
conveying law with the face of a friend
and the voice of bad dreams.

It's not the dreams
It is the dreams
Dreams where the body learns how to be sworn
against itself and the mind hooks into that shape
and waking up doesn't mean what anyone else
seems to think it does -
doesn't mean that at all.

You told me you moved past it
And all those times I'd made
Drowning motions in the face
of razors, smoke, the rush of
concrete -
- all those times were suddenly
dreams too, not one meaning what I needed it to.

1.
fireflies were the magic we used
to keep the night to ourselves
small and powerful

2.
in my favorite movie you said
this, forever - hands grasping
stronger hands - this

3.
the attic meant secrets
the basement meant trouble

4.
he made me human because i cried
though he gave me fair warning
not to

5.
our snow palace didn't melt until April
which was when we left -
two with wings, two on wheels

6.
"that was the last time
i let myself
do anything for you"

7.
the fireflies became egrets and
you didn't mind as much as i did

8.
bottlecap boy, boy with the chipped tooth
boy standing on the cinema seat screaming happiness;
that was you, though you wouldn't
recognize it anymore

9.
went to town if you could call it that
but i forgot to hold your hand and
got lost in a sea of strangers who
seemed to have borrowed my face

10.
then was the year of water guns and spring fling
us dancing like toy monkeys on Christmas
(the ones sent back for doing the wrong things)

11.
your house had mangroves
sea forests where we argued over
who would be king

12.
some things couldn't possibly change

13.
some things didn't want to

14.
under the table made a poor hiding place
but i remember you there anyway, shaking
and splintering into smaller yous

15.
tried to write letters from other people
to myself, anything to put the voices
somewhere i could mortalize them

16.
not children but still small, still here
still true that
i'd know you in any light
and
you'd know me in any dark

17.
sent my love with bandages since
safety missed you terribly and
insisted on waiting for you
the reliable end of a too long day

18.
once built a house to the best of my ability;
used popsicle sticks, glow-in-the-dark stars, and
a few hours daring to be proud

19.
i was not quite tall enough for the ride

20.
last time i saw you
you were happier
and older

21.
it was the second one that sent me running

22.
lost a lot of money and none of it was mine
they said everyone hits the tipping point differently
i just wanted them to tell me how to be the same

23.
some envies never left me:
stephanie's hair, shambray's roses, sarah's strong left kick,
you dripping rain with me in the back of the room

24.
yes, i learned
how hard easy inevitable it was
being jealous of yourself

25.
"don't look back," everyone said this
no one actually managed it but, anyway,
i preferred the person more likely to lend me binoculars
he who'd let me see for free what others paid so much for

26.
(we could still be something)

27.
i found your letter
yellowed, smelling like old books
smelling like Clematis at dusk;
wrote you back too
well, started

28.
as always i was hoping i wasn't too late
though i knew it'd been years in the making:
this tradition that i always am

29.
someday i will ask if you remember me and your answer
will be to show me how the car failed
to kill you - proof of how bad we are at getting
what we want

30.
dreamt another "i", train rattling on stilts
thought this one would look good with friends
woke up to disabuse the notion then
planted over it

31.
that garden was a fantasy before i knew what fantasy was
so it was just real

32.
i don't regret the difference

33.
the treehouse with the rope ladder and the broken window
remember? dad built it overlooking dark pines, adjacent to the sweat-house
it always smelled like someone who'd been hurt

34.
once from the backseat we watched the moon swallow the sky
witnessed how it followed us like a dog, enormous and loyal
"Sky Puppy," you said, and still do

35.
nights i bleed bruises are nights i feel most like myself
you taught me not to fear the dark but now i'm afraid
with all the lights on, radiator hissing in your sibilance

36.
we were not very big and our hearts were smaller
i thought this and i think this and i never understand
maybe we weren't built for it

37.
the treehouse wasn't

38.
white envelope but not plain since no envelope sent is actually
plain is it? unearthed it jammed between books CDs shadows dust-
jackets big enough to grow into; your will, you said meaning "mine"
meaning, "hold onto this for me", meaning, "you can keep it
but nothing else"

39.
spoiled by Trinidad, deluded by Ireland, deported by Korea
inherited by Greece, embraced by wood stoves and stories
we drew ourselves into, small handed
your heart
steeped for years in different looking skies

40.
the hospital still scares me today, tonight, tomorrow
with its bright whites that make me forget people get better;
coats there counsel faith but i don't believe in anything so clean

41.
dark suddenly, but this really happened, i think: the big dipper watched the little dipper
all those wires stringing her stars together, singing her to sleep,
trying to understand

42.
i grew up listening to owls and heart monitors

43.
the sea glass collection was our largest
followed by stone hearts and drift wood birds fashioned out of salt water,
they made you first beautiful, then bitter

44.
decembered my way into the summer
you know i hate my birthday

45.
my favorite writing happened in letters
in love stories that were war stories
that weren't worth their weight in life

46.
my favorite place hid along the coast
of your collarbone
where fingertips played as if pressed
to the most fragile piano

47.
my favorite you
followed me into exile
even though i deserved it

48.
there were no forests here, so i missed them
there was no you here, so i missed you
the difference: i wondered if you ever returned the favor
but the trees struck their peace a long time ago

49.
yesterday the wind nudged more than pushed my contents
as i edged along cracked cement wondering
why even cowardice is so difficult

50.
promised you tomorrow i wouldn't go, i know i
broke my promise, then
apologized and did it again

51.
there was summer: our jump with all our clothes on
all our laugh lines intact, acting as an open palm between my shoulders
we'd never have it again but the sun that day was indelible
even the water was sweet

52.
the best voices never belonged to me, have now moved far away but
sometimes i imagine the conversations we would have

53.
i bought a hundred postcards trying to reach them

54.
the idea was to tell the truth but i blew
most of my time remembering how

55.
last May i stole to the beach, still repellant as ever but
was worth it
on the offchance you'd be there: up to your knees in moonlight

56.
my love didn't know how to separate, threw itself
into oncoming storms, and
survived

57.
once spent three hours searching
for a familiar name in an alphabet of strangers
who couldn't be less interested if they tried

58.
the truth now: sleep
revealed its teeth a year ago
give or take

59.
wanted to tell you all about it
how the car missed your life
by hairline fractures like it knew
what it was doing all along

60.
i was never so lucky

 i can't do anything though i want to
need to
need you
to understand.

you will want to die
more than once, more
than many onces until
once goes mythical
like easy days and
      love smoothing your
      hair back when you're
   sick when you can't
           breathe when it's
                                   everything you can do
to fold.

you will hate people
founded and unfounded
  blistering years or
  hectic seconds, flashes
of the "I" most of us
keep in check since
to let it out is too
high stakes even for
an addict, even for an
                      emergency bleeding out
         your eyes at strangers.

you will panic
quiet
loud
an explosion on mute,
cutting before the
        dust remembers how
to settle, before
        you remember
how to save yourself
with lies and
subtle objectivity.

you will read a book
watch a movie
listen to a song
feel a hand
and then you will
          have to
    take them with you
all of them
           shy of baggage but
still heavy, still
yours.

you will find yourself
lost looking for
nameless countries
people and probably
comfort, the search
       aching its distance
                                under the skin
as natural as
any other part of you -
         natural as any part
of anyone.

you will want to die
you will hate people
you will panic
you will
read watch listen feel take
you will lose
and find
and then
if you're lucky
if you're breathing
you will know

what no one else
can know for you:
which touch of
sound or color
which punch of
dreams or air
which cinched sky
or encaged earth
swallows you whole,
scrapes what's
somehow still there,
and takes it
     right into danger
       into the light
       lays it out
       and says,
          "yes" "stay" "love"

the good parts are you too,
(no yes no yes no yes no and so on)
buried. it's not a shovel
you want anyway though
is it.
open your hand.
i (you) know
just
what i (you) need.

eleven dead flowers, blown into the ground
for when your children sit alone and
know none of this. roots where roots will
have the most trouble. a house built by
a you who never lifted a hammer in all her life.
but love still. mangrove born, sea forest
where feeling nests as its own story, time told
like a compass often broken and always
inarticulate - as is its wont.
they won't know.
and you can't tell them.
so flowers. so roots.
so sunlight: necessity.
so moonlight: exhale.
so.

so you will need to
remember this
for later
  when you can't believe a word of it.
  write it and it burns
                    so hold it under your tongue instead.
               press it down. then curl, and swallow
in return.

Bravery cameos on a Wednesday,
your coat with the multicolored
embroidery, repeating stitches where you breathe

Red outsides soft sleepy white insides
especially where it touches the anxiety of your nape -
the brush of someone else's safety flicked on
Red coat, back of your neck yes, back
of your heart yes, where
threat rests just as often if not more so
Red for years without wear then new,
then Wednesday red, different red than what you wanted,
knowing there's nowhere for your coward to go.

Bravery stumbles fast back to the room you'd burn for just half
your worth, for anything, for nothing since, as it turns out,
even courage prefers to backhand you.

Please enclose your darlings, your
eyeteeth, your hands otherwise
occupied with a piano heart, even
your maps replete with dust just
waiting to take you somewhere old.
Give me ten ways to find you hidden
as leveled mountains, as trains
crashed and still burning, as the
lengthening shadow, as whispers
making waves on our shore, as one
night spent idle but painless, as
aspen woods in spring, as the curve
of a planet (not necessarily ours)
as moonlight making notes along your
profile, as cold air, as a mouth who
only knows words of forward motion.

Send your language too - broken off and
experimental, odes to those films you
devour: one continuous shot where
everything happens. No stops, no
chance to breathe or blink because
you might miss something. I want that
and more. But especially the language.
Broken off, I want your verbs set to
stun, your nouns engineered as only
last hopes can be, your adjectives
stitched on the insides of eyelids
everywhere
omniscient even when you sleep.

Light: the knife in the dark and the secrets it kept,
slatted half shadowed and learning how waiting
could mean something different depending always
on where you were standing. Light kicked back from
the moon and her territories, moonrise, moonset, all
coming together on the horizon like a word endlessly
sought and seldom found. Want to tell you just the
good parts, the parts that mean we're whole and solvent
from heart to harm. Want to tell you how it ends, how
we make it. How I stuck around after all. Want to tell
you I know honesty now, the shape and taste curling
under the tongue and how it's paradise; how it's poison
only because I'm allergic. I explain myself away,
desperate to disappear but it doesn't work; it never works
when you want it to. Isn't that right. Light in the dark,
even with the exits all shut and the electricity abandoned.
Ugly moon pale and falling into places she doesn't belong,
moon whose name abstains from written history but
settles the way some names do:
hands on the piano broken some years ago
hands around my throat, hands that were my own hands
hands controlled underneath by other versions of "I"
shadowing and shaking for reasons
I can never seem to remember.
But I remember you. The moon. And
the things you saw in it
until you couldn't see anymore.
Want to tell you I sleep over your deadness
looking for life. But maybe
you already know.

No moonlight on this future. The moon is gone.
We ate it because we loved it, loved it to death
and buried it in old photographs. Not a fairytale
before you get ahead of me. This metal heap
sings its own truths, throbs its own lies, but not
one ends up magic. In the future, extinctions
run feral: no destiny and your dreams are just
a sickness. You: a child. It: a war machine's
egg, cracked early and testing its life against
yours. Green, green grass. Plastic blue skies
curving overhead as a bridge. Acrid taste then
the smell, almost a real hand pushing through
your mouth to introduce itself. War machine's
baby lands, kills thousands underfoot, but this
is just what war machine baby was built for.
You're young enough to want to tell it, outside
of fear, outside yourself: it's not your fault.
There there. It's not your fault. Screams in
peripheral distance hiss otherwise but here
is your kin; you understand contracts. You
know about life before life. We lost the moon
the same way. Dreams. Bad dreams. Monsters
in the closet, under the bed, in the heads of
people with power. War machine baby lands
all the way, a small homage to retro animation
and a bigger shrine of fighting always functional
enough to keep. It aches. Doesn't know how
to do anything else. It fires. Someone told it to.
In the dust storm its core glows red. Blood moon
apple eyed and alone, speaks a language
no one else can hear.