Frost caught up
to ghostly fingers;
His December walks
filled dark prophecies,
would he witness
another year
or a month?

In the deep snow,
he knew the answer.

The Necromancer told him,
in her underworldly dreams,
he had once been her true love.
He smirked:
I’m still here
in your words.

The Necromancer first noticed her magic
at seven, when her cousin passed.
Thunder descended upon her planet
to whisper a soft, solemn song of despair
and she knew, before anyone told her,
she knew death.

At thirteen, Pops followed into darkness,
but the Necromancer saw him again.
He walked her otherworldly dreams
in some distant galaxy, he held her
crying frame, he pleaded between sobs:
Take care of the living.

Still, the Necromancer never ceased to go
into other realms, flirting with the abyss,
colouring neverlands with her imagination.

It all changed when her youngest sibling
Fell.

Now, only sometimes,
when a full moon looms over silver clouds,
only then she peers behind the veil
and visits her brother in another existence.
They talk, they laugh, they cry,
but she always returns home,
because he is the one soul
with the magic to convince her
to live.

He will forever be
in his poetry notebook
behind my black-and-white poster,
next to ashes—his ashes—I smuggled
through customs in two different countries,
thinking he'd probably do the same for me;
After all, he was the one who taught me
how to smuggle things through airports in the first place.

We would both laugh
that I managed to bring a part of him all the way here,
like we'd laughed when he brought **** in his backpack
from Canada to the U.S., and from the U.S. to South America.
Who can blame him? Canadians have the best ****.
I bet he'd like that I made the inverse journey
with him, or what I have left of him,
and that he's not just at the bottom of some ocean,
or worse, at our mum's.

For the young,
the gut-wrenching ache
of love lost
Remembers.

The old witches know:
it forgets,
for memory is the reward—
a gift for having known
a twin in this world
(even if only for a short time).