What can I say besides the rain makes me worse,

erodes my chest a moat.

I google how to write grief & place,

how to talk about living loss,

earthly, chronic, tugged,

& the answer is always you don’t.

[some insight about life as a tourist,

days peripheraled, vision stirred?]

It was Christmas. I was sacrilegious

& swallowing mulled wine.

My reflection was dribbling & the sun

was being sucked up with sky.

[subjects performed actions;

you felt acted upon]

How to move on as passerby,

pure foot, wet pictures—

[in a previous draft, you wrote

persistent animal fear,

keep in here?]

you’re my godblur.

[too overt]

The painted houses are just painted houses.

[needs more meaning]

I want to tell you how I traveled

all the way to Copenhagen

just to eat 7/11 for dinner

[what’s it mean? specifics? bagel, likely cream cheese, how you’d laugh, wouldn’t care, make it up—don’t remember]

but you’re a ghost I can’t have

yet, you’re unthere—

in the bunker claire crunches out a speech // how we are bigger than our bodies // wheeling toward a victory // a fleet of motorcycles five hundred feet away // and it doesn’t matter where we go because we aren’t dying alone anymore // come and gather, girls // this fight’s what we were born for // she busts into the sun // knives blazing into wide jaws // fresh blood // bandana crust // run she says to us // between silver bursts into skin // so we race towards the metal // kick the bikes back as claire cries how we will be remembered // the world will know us by our red hands // they will know us by our dust

after phoebe tells me she wants to die, we roll our eyes // there is nothing deader than an indie darling so she was already leagues deep // I slur words and ask her if she likes ohio // enough to live for it // she says no but does anyone and don’t we all exist anyway // the zombies chase after us as we escape our hideaway for one last night // she strikes charli and jack with her spiked bat as we run and it is sick and beautiful like us // our bodies bitten // turning undead // she pushes me towards the tour van and I know where we’re meant to go // our mountain dew-rotted veins drive us home // past the sun like she always wanted // and when we pull over on interstate 71 and look up it is barely there // our sights bleeding away // HELL IS REAL // IF YOU DIED TODAY WHERE WOULD YOU SPEND ETERNITY // and I feel a hunger taking over // a throatfire inside me // right here, phoebe // I say // come nearer, baby

after death cab for cutie

the atlantic was born

because we thought we could swim

without drowning.

unfortunately love is a lake.

like a poem,

there is too much depth

to undress all at once.

the distance expands, turns to weight.

***

to navigate gaps

through haiku—you said water

was simple, its moves

predictable, filling

gaps, crowding spaces up.

i need you so much closer.

unfortunately poetry is never enough,

not for us. in the end

it was the unphysical gestures.

***

i want to say poems are boats,

but they carry us

only in feeling.

we were word,

unguided and formless—

unfortunately love is a verb.

It’s about fireflies,

how, as a child, my mother would fashion

their abdomens into earrings.

Those nights, I’d cry, not

at the cruelty, but the feeling,

the glow on my earlobes

a brittle-cut gorgeous.

While we wore the jewelry, we’d pitch

baseballs over the grass, watch the beanfields

frame the sunset as it deadweight-dropped

over us, draped us in starred space

where we, too, were blinking,

half-dead satellites. I never liked

the light I carried. I never wanted

to burden other bodies

the way their bones burdened me.

When the cicadas came, I worried

what my mother would make of them:

their shells finger puppets on the shelf,

how I’d hate the way they felt on my skin

but I’d never tell.

after Robert Reeve’s tweet thread: https://twitter.com/RobertGReeve/status/1397032784703655938

Even this news feels less devastating than your absence.

I read about how my phone cross-references

my data with the data of those around me,

building networks of information, and it’s heartbreaking,

knowing that Facebook will never spy on

our aggregate metadata. Mark

will never infringe upon our shared conversations,

how you said once that you wanted a Big Mac

but it never affected my UberEats app.

Our advertisements will never be the same—

the toothpaste brands will always be slightly different,

Colgate versus Oral-B. I could coo it’s all about current

location, baby. Think of the damage we’d do

if you’d come see me. But you don’t visit,

and I try not to fantasize about the digital trails

we both leave. How, each night, I wonder

if you track me like a cookie, if

I’m in your browsing history.

#revision

Friends, I have gathered you here today

to ask for your hand in lifelong coalescence:

yes, we come together forever and ever

and never stop.

I have seen so many shapes:

Vs of angels, street choirs of geese,

branched roads and nettled square trees,

yet predictably I always return to the circle

and I won’t dwell long on its form but I must say

I see its roundness as a sort of resilience,

how it continues to permeate like ivy.

I am fond of its perseverance (though I won’t expand on it)

but I believe that all good things are round

and if they are not round they are missing

a piece, as Silverstein would say.

Just think. Pies. Heads of bells. Sound itself.

Of course, music is curved. Aren’t we just

wheeling air into song when we sing?

Friends, stick with me, I mean to make my point soon.

We can also apply circles to springtime, to buds.

To bloom is to open, to wait for a wound but widen

anyway, because there is nothing to fear in the form.

It’s fearless, the space. Unbolted, free. See

how there is an inside and outside of the circle, but no corners

to hide behind. A circle is a valley of flowers

and glitter. Shimmer with me for a minute

as we imagine how lovely our lives would be

if we believed we could fold ourselves into more,

a puddling of its soft core:

our wholeness, a full emptiness, our endlessness.

5/31: x days before you leave

I feel it coming like a bad heartbeat

and wonder if there will be an after:

how I’ll remake myself and continue past

the moment, if I can fix my own devastation.

Is it possible to live undevastated

with your absence? I don’t want to be your trail

but I can’t forget you either. No joy now.

We carry traces of each other like snow.

You’ve shaken yours off, somewhere, in summer.

I wrap mine around me for a cloak.

Everything I write contains you. I build boxes

to save you. And still I am the one stuck

inside them, clawing at walls. I could yell

get out of me but truthfully I like the haunting,

how your memories call to me when I’m lonely

and I sponge them up with my whole body.

I imagine what you’d say to me. Get over it.

Who cares. We didn’t mean anything.

But everything with you felt like the good ending,

finally living the life you’re meant to be from. Now

I can never write past the middle, and that’s what scares me most—

I don’t know what you’re doing when you’re gone.

Even you too, now, look dead.

The light migrates to you but there is no brightening,

no readjusting of eyes to new color.

And when the plants die each week

I revive them. We all live on edges,

waiting for our turns to jump

through the walls and into some fresh time-

line full of doors and staircases, any exits

that could lead to birds. I miss the potential

of wings. I have lived in my life so long

that I feel like a tourist. Do you speak

my language? Where is the exit?

Which way do I go?

5/27: x days before you leave

it seems you’re not leaving anymore

but your absence still lingers heavy

like a greedy ghost

I bet you’re wondering how I’m still

haunted when you’re alive and beside me

(it’s painful, the doubleness)

I want to tell you you’re like a shadow stretching

in multiple directions and consuming

a city and there is no one to stop the darkness

because how can you stop light

from leaving

(you can’t even close your eyes to it)

you are a body beside me and a body collapsing

before me and the time it takes to reach you

as you go is always too long