“I have been missing your voice / like bleached bones dream of flesh.”

How does every person not cry out all the time? Yes, it was good to eat doughnuts. Yes. I was blessed by many days of joy. A rabbit in the driveway. A rosemary bush with a sorcerer’s cloak of spider webs.

Look now: my heart is a fist of barbed wire.

Hands can remember too.

“I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

““Forests have secrets,” he said gently. “It’s practially what they’re for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.””

“(…) one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.”

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.