Will you be small?
Smaller than bones allow
Enough to see the scratch you’ve drawn between us for the chasm it is
to fall into
to lay fallen
to awaken sick amid dirt walls not painted in testimony but
as animal sounds gutturally spoken and painfully misheard
as a ladder that gives up before its highest rung is reached
as houses lit but not lived in
Will you concede that a body with a name can remain irreconcilable?
Carrying trauma is like walking around with a knife in your belly. Even after you’ve become accustomed to the idle pain, people will bump into you and set it off anew. They’ll walk on with barely a nod. You’ll mutter under your breath how they should really watch to where the fuck they’re walking. Maybe they’ll overhear you and become incensed themselves; they are moral and good after all; it says so on their dating profiles.
Come in when you visit.
A crooked step doesn’t bite.
The dog will;
He begs to be ignored
If you smell the backed up drain
As we eat, breath; relax
With the cheek only butter is spread
And barring a meaty mouth
Our egos will be too
Thinner is a practice;
Or it is patience;
I am losing it.
A lifetime is what I mean.
We should be so remarkable
Home used to be about softness, warmth, an enveloping blanket, a delight in the safety of inwardness and an affirmation that all what came before was right to deliver us here. All of our past hostages worth saving disarmed and corralled into boxes labeled “memories”; our struggles were known and of our own making.
This place and all of its artifacts are changed.
orbiting thoughts and their ripples move back and forward and laterally into that begin sweet but cruelly contort and fade at such a minimal distance.
Lately I’ve wished for pronouns that would carry lost loved ones into everyday conversation, even the smallest of small talk. (No, not even that insightful or consequential. We’re talking dog park conversation here.)
Nice weather wye’re having though it’d also be nice to have some rain cause mur rain barrels sure are empty. Holy shit, that really would be the best. Say, is your dog part boxer? Wye used to have a boxer mix so your dog must be at least part as well.
One future is slowly reticulating. It’s a ghostly sketch with a road for me, a road lined with family, friends, and peddlers.
Due South there’s a great spire stitched with countless switchbacks that she and he climb together, at all different times and in the same time. As a fragile infant, he is cradled by her. As a toddler, he’s on her back. A few rungs higher, he’s walking and playing with rocks and sticks and his mother’s shoes and she walks more slowly than before and now.