I do not believe in heaven or hell, but I believe
in whatever vindictive god left me here
like an unfinished sentence: incomplete, unenclosed, trailing
commas and semicolons and dangling prepositions
in my wake, tethered to nothing but my own beginnings
in a world obsessed with the way things end—I did not ask
for answers, and yet they were given to me;
I did not ask to be dragged down and anchored to a single story,
trapped between well-meaning parenthetical smiles (“put a period there,”
they say, “and begin a new sentence"—
but how can I start over when I have only just begun?)

on saturdays, they broke our knees.

mondays and wednesdays were reserved
for the study of literature,
for splitting open our heads and branding the words of the great writers
into our bones,
copying them over and over in our own blood,
memorizing masterpieces until we knew them forwards and backwards,
in order to remind us that there was always someone out there
who was better than us
(so we might as well not even try).

on saturdays, they broke our knees,
because pain would make us stronger.

on tuesdays and thursdays,
we were chained to a wall of numbers
and forced to take it apart piece by piece
(then put it back together, exactly how it had been before)
learning the true nature of  things from the inside out,
so that we would always have an answer for everything,
and never have to just sit and wonder
at the world around us.

on saturdays, they broke our knees,
so that we would learn to know the sound of shattering better than our own skin.

fridays were the days
when we were taught history,
when we were told the stories of our pasts and their pasts
and all the pasts that had ever been,
so that we would learn from our mistakes (and their mistakes,
and all the mistakes that had ever been)
a thousand times over—
learn them so well that we would carry them with us forever,
and never be tricked into letting go.

on saturdays, they broke our knees,
so that we would always have something familiar to fall back on.

sundays were our day of rest,
when we stole a rowboat
and paddled off into the mist,
until the fog was so thick that we couldn’t see our own feet
(it was the closest we ever got
to emptiness,
not that we would ever admit
we desired it).

but on saturdays, they broke our knees,
so that we would remember to come back eventually.

we always did.

I remember very little
of the last time I saw you.

Your drink tasted of anger and tears,
mine of things left unspoken
(I think
we were both a little bit drunk,
though neither of us cared to admit it).

You fed me silence,
and I fed you words—
we agreed that we would prefer not to repeat the experience,
though privately we each decided
it was the best meal we had ever had.

there are mockingbirds in my bones,
I tell you,
and you laugh (I laugh too).

(the house is burning down around us,
but we don’t talk about it—
when there’s nothing left but ashes,
we’ll have nowhere left to run)

where did you hide yourself?
you ask me,
and I scream your name (you don’t hear me).

(there is a madwoman in the attic
and I talk to her at night—
she pretends not to recognize me,
and I pretend not to recognize myself)

sometimes I hear my mother’s voice,
I tell you,
and you say nothing (it suffocates me).

(once you called me lost and lovely
when you thought I wasn’t listening—
and maybe that's true,
but did you ever really try to find me?)

how can I forget you?*
you ask me,
and I ignore you (you didn’t really want to know).

in the beginning, we
were nothing. we were bloodstains.
we were the dust on the floors
of our grandmother's houses in the days
after the funeral. at night,
you played the piano: we were the silence
after the last chord, and when the applause came
we collapsed like a house in a hurricane.
and you told us to cry. you told us
to shriek ourselves into oblivion, to scream the night away
and rise with the morning sun. you carved us
out of glass, in the half-light before dawn, and you told us,
this is stasis. this is stillness. this is silence.
you knew that nothing
could become something, and
that silence could become screaming could become singing.
you knew that we would fly away one day,
and that when the applause came, we would stand
and take a bow, even if our bones cracked with the strain of it.