there you are
eclipsed by moonlight
& here i am
kneeling in your shadow

a black dog prayer
wedged between the
chapel silence of you
& the church bells of me

there is gravity to our
antiparallel orbit;
you, the blue planet
& me, the stranded astronaut

but you say we are at a
crossroads like it's a goodbye,
our unwinding paths
arcing through the night

i was a falling star,
a sinking ship, plummeting
into that familiar abyss
a tempest of tragedy

when i fell in love with you;
do you remember it?
how my heart lurched
in my chest at the sight of you?

there was rain
there were tears
there was dirt
there were bodies crammed

in coffin-sized pews
suits dripping with water
& you, your handkerchief,
that up till 1 in the morning grin

smelling of whiskey & wintergreen
as you pressed your shoulder
against mine so gently that i
thought you were a ghost

caught in the morning light
or an angel haloed by stained
glass, flying into church
like a starling come to roost

i cried then while you stared
at the nail bitten quick of my
fingers, at the entire mess of me
& chose to remain at my side

you tucked me in until the sheets
touched my chin & oh,
it broke my heart to pieces
you sitting in the corner

sleeping in that wicker chair
like we were strangers
like you didn't live here too
the shape of you known

by every piece of furniture
in the house
but you kept your distance
as if you were afraid

that i would burn up in
your embrace,
turned to cinders in the
enormity of your love

as if i did not throw myself
to the pyre years ago &
come sprouting from the
ash-smoked ground

you were a forest fire
a natural disaster of a lover
leaving me cracked open &
broken in a soul-starved way

knocking away the walls
around my heart
until the home that grief made
crumbled at your touch

i am bad at being vulnerable
too much animal left in me
to be soft or kind
but you never caged me

even when i was sick with
grief you held my hand
& brushed my hair &
kissed me till i laughed

i knew i loved you then
but i did not say it;
& here i am again
begging you to turn around

to see through the coward of me
to read my lips as they
whisper your name in prayer
the only word for love i know

i don't want this crossroad to
be our graveyard;
let us go out into the night & walk
a star-drunk orbit back home

god
the kindly butcher
and you, lying
obediently on the table,
cleaved neatly in half,
your sinew and flesh cut by
the same hands that molded you from the river bank,
who cradled you in the arm of a spiral galaxy
just shy of a light gentle enough to reveal the
cave around you; now, there is only
an unfurling map to the
star-speckled wings of space
that roost in every dying
cell of you.

time passes until the
begetting,
the ending,
the abandoning,
your body now bearing the marks of
a believer swallowed by tragedy:
a noah who drowns in the tempest
a jonah eaten by a great fish
a job who dies in pain and poverty--
and you
a death in slow motion.

when death casts its long shadow / when you kneel to it in a grave / head bowed, fingertips aching for something that lies beyond the dirt / is this too a kind of prayer?

a malediction spoken between the fragile stems of chrysanthemums / wing-clipped moths sedentary against the empty coffin / a rotting in progress / a funeral prepared, a body unburied, a grief that could swallow the world.

call it armageddon / call it a girl in agony / call it the act of dying slowly.

make it an act of rebellion / make the heavens fall / in a sheet of rain as sharp as silver spears / so that even the divine know your name / and the earth shakes at your passing.

the result: a redistribution of matter gone wrong / more of you left in the space where your molecules once were / a ghost that can be touched / a ghost that doesn’t know it has died / a girl turned tragedy turned monster turned memory.

If only I could drink down the rain
& become
a tadpole, blind to the river I was
born in.
A creature in metamorphosis,
small & fragile,
unaware of anything but the
water,
the embrace of a gentle current
softly
guiding me home.

I. A gene for combustion
passed down through summers
spent fishing mud-slick tributaries,
cultivating a taste for wildness
wiggling on metal hooks,
sun-bleached shells
cracking at the weight of
tar-speckled teeth;
an animal made supine,
made to mold like clay,
a carcass of love

II. thrown into a kiln,
now discarded, abandoned
hungry maggots taken to flesh,
burrowing in the soft, hidden places
where viscera meets homesickness
where memory becomes gun smoke
and home—the place where
I sweep up the broken pieces
of pottery—becomes a grave.


III. Here lies a familiar body:
bleached bone as kindling,
a house pregnant with smoke,
then fire;
this is where all
witch hunts begin—
woman made child
made martyr
made monster
made firewood,
a temporary shelter,
not a fire to be prayed to.

IV. Burning.
Morning star plummeting,
oxygen-rich, dying poor
on a back porch, basket of
vipers spilling out like kerosene
and into the woods—
a brushfire
voice of God burning
through the screen door saying
“He wept.”

V. I named the fallen star
Lazarus;
dead but not dead,
reborn in the face of my
father  
who stares
into the 500-mile long
reflection in the rearview mirror
of his ash-colored Chevy
to a place God-touched
and wild.

VII. He tucks the lion parts
of himself in the furnace,
shedding glory for loss:
to lose the rattle of the caged
animal in his chest,
the fires that hunger for more
than the pines,
to sleep without dreams of
funeral pyres covered in
snakes.

VIII. Today,
I am a ghost caught in daylight
here and not here
mind on fire
facing Lazarus in the hallway
hospital gown as yellow as
sulfur,
charcoal staining his lips
while I burst into flame,
burning screams,
a mirror’s reflection
of the worst
parts of himself.