my aunt never read the last chapter of the return of the king
just so, my tongue and lips are heavy with all the 'g's 'o's and 'b's
of all the goodbyes i never asked them to shape

goodbye sounds like a bathtub
a place where you sit and you soak and bubbles float
and you think a but
and you sift through the dirt that rests on your skin
and try to ignore the dirt that lives in your skull
and rests in the crevices of memory fences
where the paint has worn away,
leaving a map of paint chips scattered on the ground
to lead you to where your sea meets your sky,
that cognitive horizon, clouded by brainfog,
its map fallen from fence posts stripped from trees where lilacs used to grow
and now line your thoughts like the cellophane
that lined the caramels that came out of piñatas at your old birthday parties

i think about that sometimes
how the return of the king must have been so important to my aunt
that she went and stripped posts from her own lilac tree
or maybe it was an apple blossom (my aunt is from connecticut)
but whatever it was, she built that memory fence
she waited to say goodbye and then she never did
and i'm sure she sits in bathtubs sometimes and looks at the soap
and wonders if it would be easier to wash her face
if she knew what it would look like afterwards