Black squares pulled at the soles of my shoes.
Brick-red fake bricks
wrapped serpentine around cement beams
glazed and shimmering with epoxy and daylight
s
hone white on the left half a bedraggled face.
The other half smirked,
sitting cross-legged under a wall-less window
eating carrot sticks with chopsticks.

The dust in my eyes, in the blank between us
pervaded pore and nostril,
bourgeoning the ache of a flaying respite,
with the fire of a thousand minute needles
and the diaphragm-tugging grip of "come closer."

I'm praying for a day
when I can breathe in the black and white solace
of a scratchy, blurry landscape devoid of streetlights.

My eyes, filled with pollen,
are closing on the shadow of an arm casted out further than my reach,
towards a hawk's silhouette amongst the limbs of a dying birch.

I remember as thought it were today, the morning we moved to Cedar Rapids. The funeral day was clear and dry: a frosty autumn morning. My mother was crying.

Behind my closed, damp eyelids, I faced a terrible, inexplicable heartache. I wanted to forget everything we did together. We used to spin pottery, him sitting behind me, guiding my childishly clumsy fingers.

I picture vividly, to the point of tasting, the cold, dry smell of wet clay, and the chalky scrape of an unglazed ***. I kept one on my desk until we got settled.

I threw it into the ravine behind the new old house when I couldn't break the frosted ground for a burial. I cried, drinking in the beauty and stillness of the grey. My breath mingled with the fog.

Black squares pulled at the soles of my shoes, one unlaced. Brick-red fake bricks were wrapped serpentine 'round a solid cement beam, shimmeringly glazed by epoxy and daylight.

It shone white on the left half a bedraggled face. The other half smirked, sitting cross-legged under a wall-less window, eating carrot sticks with chopsticks.

There was dust in my nose, dust in my eyes, in the blank between us. How I ached to pull up my skin, burning under thousands of minute needles, and the diaphragm-tugging grip of "come closer."

Through the autumn shine
the swallows would spiral by day
and flies died at night.

We'd run in mornings
With breath crisper than limestone.
Now her legs are stiff.