It flickered in the air,
sagged branch to branch,
pushed against the windows:
a death was pulsing.

It spilled into the streets
of my hometown.
I opened an old phonebook,
the names were humming.

I was cut to pieces by it.
I knew her as a little girl,  
she knew my sister
in her hippie period.

The telephone lines cowered
beneath the gray massing of moon.
The faces of houses screamed
ceaselessly at me as I drove.

It is so insistent,
her sixth-grade smile
in my old class photo.
It hovers inside me.