“i talked to the sky/ you’re famous with the birds now they look for you in everyone i used to be like that but i got tired the clouds kept showing up and they blocked out the good parts/ and they crowded the light away from my window so i called to ask if the rain stopped where you were but the phone just kept ringing and ringing and you were gone/ not forever but long enough that you didn’t know me when you came back and my heart was letting go because i needed to sleep at night and there was no other way and i had been so many people/ all of them strangers to me and to the birds who were looking for you and my head was heavy with memories that were only good because they were out of reach and impossible to return to and i thought if nowhere else existed then the homesickness would be cured for good/ but it didn’t work and then i belonged to the nowhere and eventually lost that too and i was stuck looking for something that was gone before i had it and i know you can’t inherit grief/ but what else would explain this absence that i don’t have a name for and all these ghosts that can’t look me in the eye”

“You, who opened suns in my heart,”

“And always in my grief I wish I were powerful, a god—and if I was, if I ever could be— I promise I would never make you suffer.”