read from bottom to top*


down
   us
     bring
            to
               try
           they
when
        smoke
   like
     rise
We'll

Liz,
    I saw you on Christmas
    at church in a black dress and pearls
    we made light conversation
    as we fill filed out with the postlude
    
    31 days later, an ambulance picked you up from your friends house
    there were no lights, there were no sirens
    the obituary told me it was an accidental ****** overdose
    you were 21
    I wish i had seen the bruises on your arm that christmas
    before I walked into the snowy night

Liz,
      your funeral was held at the same church where I saw you last
      where we spent all these years
      as the postlude drew to a close
      we studied the back of wooden pews
      we asked ourself the  same question
      "Would I have been able to help?"
      we beg the walls for answers
      but they offer no reply

Liz,
     If I saw the bruises, would I have known?
     If I had known, would I have the courage to say anything?
     What would I have said?
  
    I could've given you a scared-straight talk
    with warnings and statistic
    shown you before and after pictures
    ripped from a health textbook
    but spitting facts into the face of an addict
    is like lecturing someone of the dangers of riptides
    when they're six miles from shore
    rambling about 3rd degree burns
    to someone trapped in a burning house
    but how do I keep forgiving from becoming ignoring?
    how do I stop helping from bordering on ratting out?
    I want to to get help but I don't want you to resent me
                God, what I would give
                for you to hate me right now

Liz,
      my mother discussed your passing
      with friends with red wine lips
            "Oh, Liz? Yeah- my son said she was a ****** kid"
      a ****** kid, not the pastor's daughter
     or the mission trip veteran,
     not the day care teacher, or the prankster,
     not the angel in the 2006 Christmas play
    
     Where is the line between good and bad?
     how many track marks does it take to turn a girl into a statistic?
     how far in must one drive the needle to be reduced
     to the trope of a ****** kid
     how many melted milligrams does it take to wash away the good qualities
     and leave behind a skeleton of a girl we once knew

Liz,
     they say you're gone, you're in a better place
     but God i know you're still here
     I see you in the flowers, skirting the steps of the church
     I hear you between the harmonies
     of all the hymns
     I can feel your presence
     breathing out from the cracks in the stone walls
     I see you in coffee shops
     and in restaurants and on the streets
     mocking me to do a double take
     before I remember
     and you know we have forgiven you
     as we have wailed it at the stained glass
     I really hope you have learned to forgive us

Liz,
     I saw you christmas eve
     black dress and pearls
     you died 31 laters
     you were 21
     I wish I had seen the bruises on your arm
    I wish I could've helped

cigarette ash burns into my skin
an exposé of the number of times
i've ****** something up
    one for some beer
    one for some ***
    one for trying to take the only life i've got
    one for sneaking out
    one for the bag i packed
    another for all the traits that I lack
my lungs are already a graveyard
i must heave to welcome oxygen
but i don't think i care anymore
dust has made its home in my airways
and the embers on skin is my destructive healing
bit by bit, burn by burn
I write an apology letter across my flesh
but i fear i do not have enough surface area
maybe one day, my skin will be nothing
but a sheet of burns and blisters
and those around me won't be able
     to stand the sight of me

I am in love
I'm in love with the green Vermont mountains
how the ridge dances with the horizon
nature's scoliosis spine
autumn leaks in
and fades the trees to embers
a fire dying into

The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.

The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.

Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.

The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.