a girl nervously swinging
her legs, fingers drumming
on paint-stained tables, rocking
in a broken plastic chair, curling
her short brown hair around her
index finger as if it could somehow
anchor her to the classroom and not
the thousands of thoughts that cluttered
her mind.

a girl who slept through class,
unable to be roused by her
well-meaning teacher; a yawn
stuck perpetually in her throat,
head nodding to a lullaby
composed of multiplication
tables, laughter, stories spoken
aloud, rain that hit the
windows in stuttering staccatos.

a girl who never learned to
study, who couldn’t understand
how someone could open a
textbook and read it—how
someone could set out to do a
task and not feel like their mind
was a jungle of vines and pitfalls and
quicksand, full of venomous, life-draining,
beasts. “how do you tame them?” she asked,
only to be met with wolfish laughter.

{silly girl, you can’t tame something that
doesn’t exist.)

a girl who felt failure in her heart--
in the way it quivered like a hare
caught in a trap whenever grades were
given out, as if the number at the top
of the page was a sword to fall upon;
better to fail without trying, to settle the
point of the blade just below her sternum,
to choose a painless death then to risk
trying and experience an even greater
sense of failure—to become the
disappointment she feared was
her only birthright.

{silly girl, stupid girl, lazy girl, “stubborn as a bull” girl,
girl without manners, girl born impulsive,
girl in a cage, girl struck by lightning,
girl without a future, girl that became an animal.)

a girl with a Sisyphus-shaped
hole in her heart, pushing her
burdens up the infinitesimal
steps of academia, jealous of
the ease in which her classmates
walked up the stairs, their
burdens as light as a few notebooks.

a girl with answers, decades later,
still struggling, but unlearning
helplessness—stepping out of
her cage, one hesitant footstep
at a time, the beasts in her head
whining softly, circling her heels,
always a lunge away from sinking
their teeth into her flesh.

she regards them with pity, stroking
their soft fur, gazing into the coal-black
eyes of her greatest fears—and thanks
them one by one for the pain, for the
tears, for the loneliness, because while
they taught her many horrible things,
they also taught her that she could
survive.

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.