/zaia/

From becoming, just gray and white

Then I’ve got rain, hey honey,  And it might (go)

What a timid heart here, running

From coming 

We have a nerve pinched between 

truth and headlines

because the news knows how to curtain

the silhouettes outside

feeding us with planted weapons, and pale tears,

like the two slivers of a snakes tongue

Like a cigarette consumed by flame

Each breath making the smoke you need

and told me stories administered with repetition, 

and the pills stick to her teeth when she grins.

but even bloodwork and scales 

can’t give language

Kind of like how mothers with sick children

Visit the water well. 

Trying to drink every feather and strand

praying to someone they didn’t previously believe in

We made plans to unravel

Our packs used for travel

In a place where busses don’t breathe, so we could read

Letters that had piled up in our pockets.

But my sacrum took space, locked it

Away

And we are more open than 

Spider sores and bedtime

on the nights 

Where the moon shines too bright

For it to hide behind curtains.

She apologized 

While thousands of miles high

Above gravity

Bleeding explanation onto paper

Like I am her prescription

Seeping medication to later

Like we could wait to listen

She doesn’t know me,

We found her after four days, in 

a cave above the lake 

hair crystallized 

and eyes iced in stare. 

 Upon the walls 

 were clay depictions

 of hundreds of human arms

 becoming tentacles. 

 And at first, they weren't even noticeable, 

until our sister brought a match to flame 

 and held it to every crevice and ridge line 

studying the stories that the years had carved to the hillside,

 We brought her home. 

 We put her in the basement- tied 

drapes over the doors 

painted the windows with prayers, 

cut off the horse's tail and

 braided it between candles. 

 They told us to give her to the library

 to test if she could float 

They told us to bury her with her guitars and old clothes 

But mother, instead, 

let her body become part of the bed

 in hope we'd somehow find gardens 

Or monarchs, or feathers...

 I was scared of skeletons, at the time, 

Though I had a collection of dolls

 on the shelf beside my mattress

 locked awake in smile. 

 And here 

 is the truth of it;

 I never went downstairs to ask questions. 

 I let her ghost split mothers lips 

Until the smile consisted 

 Of two halves- 

 A grin of scarlet clots, and IVs. 

 When father's nose broke, and 

our brother carved youth into shield,

 It was a cane that fought 

 The unrecognized haunting. 

 But didn't they know 

That the earth throws storms 

To combat climate change?

 I never asked her, when she came back 

To thaw, 

Why the tentacles caught fire 

When sister examined them 

Why the elastic in all her waistbands 

 Had frayed, and expanded. 

 Or why her umbilical cord 

 was what kept her alive

 As well as what 

behind these lips

she does not reply to a comment of walls

as the weather crashes and folds

her chapped skin, now stained with recycled oxygen

and the northwest winter bones.

And like a door in the same season,

now marked with lock lines, and repeat creases,

these lips are latched

Old threads were left in my hands you know

My steps unravel all we have sewn

Do you remember I’m fragile and unclosed?

I thought that this fabric was ours to hold.

This was a collective, a sharing of homes

Can you help me find some intention