For My Cousin Jason*

I hide behind the shed in my backyard hoping to smoke
long, lingering grief away, imagining how you float
among back-lit clouds because I refuse
to remember how your body must have flung
into our grandparents' mint-rimmed pool that you claimed
was a sanctuary, I couldn't have believed the coroner's
conclusion, judging the crack in your skull--

            a suicide.

5:37 AM. Your mom found you face down, surrounded
by strange black waters--

           your blood

in barely-there morning sun, making us wonder
why you chose a late night swim to clear your hazy
brain where ship-wrecked joy drifted to the unperturbed
floor of a soul too weak to surface from hideous ocean-sized distortions we never would have found within lined-spine
daydream books of childhood. Even then I knew

          escapes

were your thing: and I wish I had sent a makeshift summer
reading list or voiced some pep talks when I had writer's block
at two in the morning because then I'd know if you wanted
to find your grave in a shallow end.