They shoot seven rifles
three times
and every time it crashes against
your soul like a defibrillator
reminding your heart that it is
meant to be alive.

One.
My mama told me stories of the day I was born
and they always started with his arms
or his shoulders
because it was hard to separate me from either.

Two.
When I was a toddler I left a violet
crayon in his red pick up truck we called
“Beast” and I cried because I thought I had
ruined everything
but he took my hand and told me that
purple suited Beast quite well.


Three.
When I was five my bike broke
but all my cousins had one and they
wouldn’t take turns,
so he scooped me up,
took me to Walmart’s bike aisle
and told me to take my pick
and in one moment I went from the
kid left out
to the kid loved in.

Four.
He wrote me letters
every Valentine’s day
in scrawling handwriting
that started with “My Princess,”
and ended with
“your daddy sure loves you.”

Five.
When my uncle got married,
we went to David’s Bridal to
choose my flower girl dress
and I remember how he saw me at
7 and 27 through bittersweet eyes,
simultaneously his
and someone else’s.

Six.
When I got pneumonia
and he knew I was contagious,
he did not deny my pleas
to cuddle up with his
grandmother’s soft, pink quilt
and watch old musicals.

Seven.
The last picture we took together
he pulled me against his chest
and smiled because he still knew me,
he always knew me
and he brought me back to the shoulders
and the arms that first ushered
me through this Earth.

There is something about the clarity
of grief
and the crispness of a flag,
realizing exactly why one is hurting.
It’s not always so certain.
But, sometimes,
it is.
Sometimes, it’s so plain it hurts.
It is a casket for your father and the
shots that mean it’s over,
and oak,
bones, and gunfire
are pretty sure.

Up is like down
when you don’t realize
that you’re falling.
And I worry that
maybe your hands are too
******* in mine
to feel the wind rush past them.

Love is my sometimes fear
because it claims everything
and explains so little.

I think you are falling,
but I wonder if maybe,
it’s not quite so passive.
Maybe you’re flying.
Maybe we both are.

You come to me at night
between the inhale
and exhale,
in the time where,
for just a moment,
I am not reminded
that you don’t do this
anymore
and that I still
have to.

You are the last moments
of sunshine in
everyday
and yet,
the night is in you.

Your spirit smells bright
and runs red
like that of
Valentines
and veins.

You are goodness
and greed
perpendicular.

You trouble me.
I love to
hate you.

You,
you were in every
awakening
where nightmares
and dreams
curled together
like fists
and caresses.

I will never
be sure of you,
of us,
until the
next dreams fall on me
between your dusk
and dawn.

He was a Redwood tree in California,
born and raised in Missouri and
chopped down Virginia.
His spirit was oaky strong
and wrought with the wisdom of ancient bark,
but dead four years shy of fifty.
That was my father.

But a tree fell today.
A tree whose roots were rocked to
their core with hit
after
hit.

He raged while I danced around
the trunk of the father I remembered.
Hoping, praying that maybe the impact of
little feet on soft ground could
rock a forest back into rhythms of strength.

Feet do not make roots grow deeper.
Feet tear roots up.


I found him curled up and crying in the closet.
I should’ve looked for him sooner.

So let me answer the riddle:
the answer is
yes.

When a tree falls in the forest,
and no one is around to hear it
I assure you

it makes a sound.

And when they ask me what my greatest regret was,
when I am older than he ever lived to live,
I will tell them that I was not
with him when he died.

I will tear into bottom lip
like roots tear dry ground
and tell them that I was
branch of his branch and
vine of his vine, but I do not know
what he wished to say to me
in the last moments this earth afforded him.