"Can I take you home?" Home-
"The place where one lives
Permanently, especially as a member
Of a family or household"

It was August of 1993,
Summers were always humid down there
We would sit by the lake and watch the boats
With their bright lights and distant laughter
We would swing under the branches of the weeping willow
Catching fireflies in jars, just to let them go moments later

He would only come 'round when it was warm again
He would take the boat out with us, teach us how to fish
We ran to the end of the driveway-
Where he would pick us up to go get ice cream
I would stare at his hands, shifting gears, ***** and shaking

She would get angry with him and smash the dinner plates
We would sit outside and hum our favorite songs
Falling asleep under the willow, just beside the motionless water-
Shaken awake by the sound of yelling turning to screams-
Then, the sound of a hammer snapping against thick steel- again-
Muffled cracks stuck in our eardrums, repeating

Under the willow lay a fresh mound of soil
Next to it, a small cross we had woven out of sticks and twine
He left as suddenly as summer days, never found
The fireflies didn't come 'round anymore, people in boats didn't laugh anymore
Soon after, it was abandoned- that home -and never spoken of again

December 18th, 2018
I've been running down this
Snow-covered road
For fourteen miles
With arrowheads
Pierced through
The bridges of my feet

Extremities turning blue, then black
You can't turn back now, face it-
"Twelve inches overnight", they said
We reap what we sow, echoing...

A whisper ran beside me
Running off the road - into the woods
I followed-
Until we reached the lake

Frozen almost to the center
I laid down, began making snow angels
Looking up at old light and dancing trees
I hope the ice cracks reach me-
Before they do

I awoke in the night and felt your back against mine
Was this some sort of sign, some distance I couldn't explain?
Or was this a self-perceived storm in the making
constructed from nothing that was real?
The darkness took comfort in those nights we spent
back to back
Ticking, ticking, ticking-
Searching for an outlet, even forging one out of our lack
of subconscious physical attachment, trying to
create a wedge

The wedge served as an object that would separate
my vulnerability from reality
Creaking across my temples and finding solitude in
the destruction of everything I held dear,
you.

As time went on, naturally that wedge became an abyss
and every night I fell hundreds of feet over and-
over again- until my heart shrank into a thread.
The feeling of uncontrollable anxious behaviors
began to manifest in my chest
There it remained-
digging around to find its home, once more
In my adolescent insecure tendencies

“Put pressure on it, it needs more pressure”
Holding your wounds shut
That senseless force is what took you away
Pressure- to be... whilst not desiring to be
You saw the clouds moving in greyscale
I saw the hills below scattered in shades of green,
Cavernous, shadowed, cryptic, familiar-

We were advised to go as the crow flies
I cried to a nameless God that your crow’s feet
Were from insurmountable happiness, not the pressures endured
I’ve forgotten much since the storm some-178 weeks ago
Though my body remembers yours over and over again
My skin has yours imprinted, correlated
Forged into one point on the axis between here and there
You the X, I the Y

The Earth crept between the crevices, curling
Through the distance between the Right radius and ulna
Elbows breaking knuckles, blood remains to be spilt
Blood doesn’t connect, if anything it merely separates

Scarecrows don’t help much when the crops won’t grow this year
Ants crawled out of the barrel of a shotgun
Observing the process of cleaning bones after tragedy

Follow the moss to find your way North with no direction-
Sometimes on the other side it’s not greener,
It’s more terrifying than ever before
Terrain untouched, unspoiled, sacred-

Climb up the trees with me, find your quiet
We won’t carve our names but we’ll find our niche
You’ll have quills and I’ll have armor
Not even the thought of stolen arrows,
Lost time through distance,
Or perhaps a slew of chemical imbalances
Can reach us up here
I chose to glue your pieces back together with mud and straw
Taken from the fallen, the loved and now distant memories

You may be an abandoned military base offshore
What was once used by many-
Witnesses life again, life of a different kind
The vegetation will ease its way into the cracks
Constructed when the foundation began to decay
It has a beauty of its own, one of self-sustainment
An everlasting beauty that connects itself
To the surrounding extravagance, often times ignored,
Death isn’t the only way to be forged into nature, remembered

Fear doesn’t always win, nor death do us part so soon
I hope your skin and bones remember before the end