It’s on the days it flashes by in feeds that someone else has left us; on the days we remember those woven into eternity, a tapestry of the never-forgotten; on the days we debate over who’s lives really matter; on the days we forget it all or cannot stifle the memory, so we suffocate.
The end is always present in my flesh and in my blood, like the burgeoning beginning behind each closing eye — a familiar tingle up the spine when silence falls around me —
but it’s ever-presence doesn’t make each passage any purer. No, it’s all just slowly staining me like the wine within the glass, licking up the sides until it spills.
So I grieve again, I grieve. For what is earth except to teach us how to grieve?
Ice
at the tip of my finger,
smooth
on the glass, a smudge
against my other eyes,
staring back at a face I know.
I see you in me,
all backwards in the mirror,
all wrong within the mirror,
all bent behind the breaking —
and I flinch against the sliver
diving deep
into my palm.
Behind the blood we hold tight to heaving chests,
we reach through windows
and come back cut to the quick,
bearing
a wound
for the world.
call & response
I believe in the power of the broken
to attract,
like blooms, precarious
on the stem. They cast
nectar-sweet lines to passing bees,
fluted stanzas on a summer’s day.
Pass me by
if you will,
but it will do your heart good
to shelter here
and sip
the bitter with the sweet.
hide & seek
Where are you, beloved?
I adore your lips.
Let your answer
be my breath.
I wish that this was
only hide-and-seek,
but I smell death.
Where are you, beloved?
I know why you
flee, and my heart
within me grows.
The deeper in
you hide from me,
the deeper I will go.
Where are you, beloved?
Come to me.
I have seen it, and
know the cost.
Come to me and
rest, for I am
willing to be lost.
half & whole
He crosses the threshold.
The place is hollowed out
like a pumpkin’s skull,
eyes cut at odd angles,
strings of cobwebs dripping
from the shell.
He broods,
a smile hovering
behind the frames.
The bones are strong,
if tinder-dry,
and welcoming
if only for what echos
down the hallways —
a life,
known to some as
a home,
time-riven
yet intact.
So he nods,
the architect,
and consults the blueprint.
Yes.
This is indeed a home,
if we can only see
the fragments
by way of the whole.
