Your 4-month-old kitten got stuck in the hollowed out tree
Half a mile into the woods behind your home
The one where you used to stash old
Board games and magazines
He died on top of a stack of TV guides
Overnight

You get used to leaving more things unsaid
With each appraisal of the stones you
Mean to leave unturned
How the quiet moments in the margins of the night
Dry up in reverse burgeoning
And you fear them shriveling to show
The insulation beneath;
You wish you were more cynical of the outside world,
And more trusting of those close to you.
Aside from the hope you stockpile
In hidden shrines between your synapses,
Silence invites nothing worth fearing
And organic silence cradles the crumpled-up papers
Disproven hypotheses and stories from another life

Your mother left the soup on low
As long as it took you to return,
Thistles hanging from your jeans and forearms.
You are not yourself, and never have been.

You want to pull off the same trick now,
Keep the burner going long enough so that
The quiet moments carry, the soup stays
Warm enough for both of you enjoy.

The loose-leaf lectures remain unnecessary.
You wrote a eulogy that day, but never recited it.
The tree continued to grow.

I feel the heat of your shoulder bleeding into mine. We are laying in the grass. No- we are laying in my bed. No- your bed. The TV is on. You fell asleep in my lap playing video games. I'm wearing red lipstick. Moments earlier, I arched my back like a kitten and took a picture of us sprawled over one another. You weren't looking. My lipstick is red. My shirt is red. My skirt has flowers. Your hair is bleached on the top. I peel the blankets from us and now it's grown out, curving over your forehead in a w. You're wearing all these pukka shell and wooden necklaces. I don't know what gave you the idea. It doesn't match. I love you. I love you so much I giggle just tracing the curve of your nose. We watch YouTube videos slowed down and laugh until we fall asleep, your hip bones pressed into the small of my back. I open my eyes and we're back in 2015. We're eating pizza, but not too much, because your stomach problems are just beginning. You accidentally say you love me back when we part at sunset. The gazebo is in the background. It's always in the background. I walk away and find myself back at your door. You struggle with the key for a moment. We just got off the bus. You couldn't drive yet. I saw your dog, pet her on the top of her head, nose turned away from her rotting teeth. Your bird sings when we walk away and we laugh at how he hates us. I stop laughing and he's dead. Your mom threw him away. You were more heartbroken than you told your friends while you laughed in the library. I shut the door behind me and you're shaking your head no a year later, me asking if we can talk, last weeks tears prickling my mind.  You say you'll think about it. You don't. I do.

The earth dreams of meteors and a frozen age,
a sea of sunken giants clambering towards smoking forts,
white noise that gathers like sweat on a green brow.

Drill and fill calcium with gold.
Her iron heart beats a recall to order,
bellowing from primordial pipes to send Your cruelest sun.

I met gravity in the deep end. Saw that god is just
a stadium light casting for bacteria at the bottom of menisci.
When her hands held me under, I forgot my name.

Seven years later, the water remembered me. A force timed
and terrible dicing my skin, grinding my scalp into unsieved wine.
Three point eight billion years came and went, a single exhale.

One day the ocean will consume me. She’ll claim my eyes,
pick my bones. Then pluck what is left
and bury it under the weight of every raindrop.
I have heard her pacing the foot of my bed.
I have smelled myself on her breath.

Bury a man and he stays
under your fingernails and in your pores, bleeding
out in every sweat drop and tapping
on the earth your favorite bass lines, becoming an itch
you only get from lying
on airport carpets knitted like mating tarantulas
or from picking at the underbelly of a scab.
For months you’ll smell like him.
Like a dead man’s hole.