I come up for air too few times, I . after Gracie Abrams, Cold Goodbyes

wrap wounds in glass bandages, I

don’t get why I’m not healing

I know every season by the aching in my wrists, I

still believe I’m nothing without pain

I lie, I twist the knife, I

trade sleep for cruel summer suns, I

get hypnotized by fire, I

I’m shut out, I’m by the wayside, I

I, I still cry inside your shadow

I hold vigils for past selves in the attic of my mind

in my mind, I

leave sentences unfinished I

I, I thought I saw something better, a future, bright

as headlights, but I

was purely dreaming in sheets of August rain

I’m a victim of the moon, I

feel everything, keep reaching, always too high, I

I, I hallucinate redemption

I can’t let go of the things we buried in goodbye, I’m

drowning in regrets, what ifs, whys, I

don’t know which half of my heart was the first to betray

me, I would’ve held my breath forever if you’d have me, I

I, I know you

I know you remember late talks, cedarwood and starry skies, I

get lost in jade pools, raindrops, low tides, I

need to see myself in water to know I

I, I’m alive.

AFTER YOUR DEATH

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left the empty jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or — like another I plucked and split open — being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Don't think because her petal thighs leap and her slight breasts flatten against your chest that you warm her alligator mind. In August her hand of snow rests on your back. Follow her through the mirror. My wan sister. Love is a trap that would tear her like a rabbit.

The nurse asks if I have both feet on the scale . [Poem ending with a line by Margaret Atwood]

and I start reciting Atwood. Truth is

it’s been a long time since I felt balanced. Longer, since I saw myself reflected in something greater than a number. The gap between my soles

and the soil gets bigger every day. I entered this world as a feather. I will exit a bird.

All this to say, I’m used to being underestimated.

The nurse doesn’t know how naked I’ve been since birth. That I learned to tiptoe before I learned to walk. She can’t count how many pounds of my flesh were lost in the leaving. The light years I starved for breath only to have it pinched. How the last person I thought to leap for let me

fall. She can’t imagine how quick

the heart shrinks in zero gravity.

How a dark mouth opened to swallow me and a poem saved my life.

She doesn’t know the string of words that’s coming out of me now like a peeled vein is all that’s holding me tethered to a few square feet of this earth.

than last Thursday, when I wandered for hours in the terrible rain then arrived.