The plastic lid on the fish tank locked you inside with Death-
A cold, liquid murderer.
You breathed in His saliva through your gills.
It gummed your mouth and jaundiced your eyes.
I watched you suffer through quarter inch glass,
While you, an inmate, wished to die
From poison oxygen on our cherry floor.
I rested a shoe on top of the aquarium lid
To prevent your suicide while we slept.

I dreamt that night of you
dragging me to the bottom of your cell
With your chapped fins and rotting
sucker mouth grasping my shoulder,
Gasping for clean water.
You forced me to inhale
Death's unforgettable stench
As we did you.

You were dead the next morning,
And I never got to tell you sorry.
Instead I shoveled your carcass
Out from the blue gravel
Coated in your corpse.

I found my mother outside in our shed
holding her trowel in May.
We walked to the farmers market
and she told me where vegetables come from.
The morning was spent planting seeds and bulbs
close to her heart, my future siblings.

Mother taught me the painstaking birth
of cabbage and watermelon.
We were impatient in the kitchen
while we stirred soup and noodles,
peaking out the kitchen window.

I started planting trees for distraction.
Mom told me
I would hammock under them in time,  
shade my forehead in leafy kisses,
turn my novel pages with soft breeze.

Father watered the tomatoes to relieve
mother from the neck-breaking June sunlight.
She watched through the doorway.
Each night, with baby monitors wired through
cracked windows, Mom waited to pick
her devotions from stem until they were ready.

In August I saw my grandma smile
in crow’s feet happiness
at life that she held in cupped palms,
covered in placenta dirt.

I watched a single spruce sprout out of crack in asphalt
Sunday morning, church time,
From my skeletal apartment
high above the street lamps,
While my eyes dried and crusted with dust.
My fingers charred to leather, tightly bound
on to the iron balcony.

But the stubble-like blemish of the road's surface
Was ****** back inside concrete
From which it grew,
A magic trick,
Like a rabbit reentering its black hole tophat,
Just as the earth was flushed
down the esophagus of Satan,
Swirling in a tornado of molten lava,
Lucifer's saliva.

I know exactly how you’re ******* your new girlfriend.

I know you’re going to play “Sing for Me” by Yellowcard in the background. I know you’re going to **** on that song like we never danced to it at prom, like you never learned it on acoustic for me, like we didn’t make out to it under my lit Christmas tree.

I know 9 times out of 10 she’s going to initiate and that will **** her off.

I know how long it’s going to last you, how you’re going to try so hard to old it in but in the pit of your stomach you know it doesn’t work.

I know your glasses are going to fog up and get smudged with face grease and you’ll need to Windex them afterward.

I know you’re going to say “I love you” to her right after. You’ll mean it, but regret that you do. Soon you’ll need to fix that.

I know you’re going to eat a bowl of Raisin Bran once you’ve dressed again.

I know you’re going to talk about this time until the next time, and she’ll give in just to shut you up. Also because she really does love you, and wants to please you.  

I know you’re going to beg she sleeps in your clothes without underwear before showering, and she will if you reciprocate.

I know you’re going to talk about *** like it’s divine, like it’s balanced on a pedestal located in the most untouched corner of Eden.

I know you’re going to treat all of this like a chocolate fountain, infinitely filling and never squandered.

And you haven’t been home, so you don’t know that the first place we made love is demolished to rubble and stone. You told me good things last forever,

But I know you lie. Yellowcard told us “no looking back when I am gone”, and for a year and a half those words were wedding vows.  

But you’re obsessed with conclusion, and feeling,

So you’ll leave her, just like you did me,

To feel again, because these love affairs are nothing but alcoholic drinks you choke down to numb.

You said don’t look back when you’re gone, but there is no forward from here.

When my ear first orbited your throat
to listen for a roaming balloon of nestled flesh
I heard trailer home hollowness
in copper vein pipes.
You draped a scarf over your superglued
neck, telling me it was normal to fistfight
death at 35.
On Dad’s desk, your weight breathed feebly
inside a sandwich bag. At night
its nuclear green cast Orions across our ceiling.
I never knew what real stars looked like,
while you had completely forgotten.

Years later,
in the dark of our 17-acre home,
you handed me your thyroid in its bag
swimming in opalescent fluid
and you looked at Polaris for the first time,
as that same glow painted the Big Dipper
on neighboring snowbanks.
I dropped the bag on the dry rot porch.
We heard your cancer flatten to a deflated bicycle tire,
sweating from death,
watched through squinted eyes as its glow turned
from hazardous neon to cinder.
It dried in the moonlight,
a forgotten, frostbitten raisin,
and our eyes readjusted to the perpetuating darkness.

I saw it then like a long constellation
line connecting star to forehead.
It had been a lie before,
but the North Star is truly the brightest
in the sky. We looked through its surface
underneath the star’s skin to its heart space,
and we realized that Polaris can only be seen
when thin plastic holds inside
damaged shadows of family
dinners bathed in deionized salt,
where I ponderously stared at the ****
in your esophagus, drawn with knife
like ruby crayon into office paper.

Leaves in trees sing sweet and sharp breeze,
Iced dew on trilliums with spring freeze.
Hushed omens of rooted deer femurs,
Rushed growth of leeks and small rivers.
Hiss of cricket and cracked, damaged
Branches that creek above in suspension,
Poised avalanches.
Moisture wicked off budding ferns down
Stems like ballpoint, quill pen turns.
Blankets of moss overtop cedar gently padded
Our toes between sock and polyester.
The smack of coyote howl hacked
Like woodpecker thwack through antlers and
Tree trunks tracked by my own ears,
And I twist each string of melody into my
Cataloged years, so I never forget the swift lifting
Spell of days when red robin throats first swelled.