Without so much as a burst of white light, without so much as a beclouded face, lingering — I want to go quietly now, like sawdust in a country road — like seafoam under a gray sunset.

My mind insists on leaving.

i am half of a sun-dried breath short of being sane. i sigh and my body bathes in a mouthful of bleeding, blue december — i can feel its colder, longer days stretching inside me.

i wish january comes here soon — in fresh, comforting, yellow warmth.

out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.

i.
i carve the sadness out of my ribs like well-soaked marrows;
they fall off like a drunken secret —
a poem within a poem within a night-long quietude

that i disturb
like a child's stomping feet among the prairie dusk.

ii.
i carve a poem,
whole and out of my tightened throat
like a reverse magic trick,
but my hands break in casual irony.
i carve a word out of my tongue
but all it does is bleed.

iii.
i carve a feeling out of a callus but
my paper-skin is left too long under a lavender storm
to still write letters like these.

iv.
the sky cries to a drunken oblivion
as i unwrite this poem in indifference.
i let myself go, like that

dead houseplant drooping in corner of my room

and cheerless, quiescent sheets
watch to pass time.

like fallen flowers, i am
weary under the subtle noise of a rushing, babbling brook;
a death, quietly scenic
as i go back to dust.
i left my body rotting in a prairie paradise,
here it decays to gray
under the bruised indigo sky.

a ghost writes her poem in silence, in small, made-up synapses,
and the wind sweeps it away.

Someone mourns and I am terrified: my skin, shrinking — closing in upon myself, for how can they break and not break at the same time?

— “I am sorry for watching you watch someone else die”

Here we are as unclaimed lights fall into the room. Here we are with better names, old letters peeling after the other. Here we are, now made of changing lights and indigo dreams. In the very last month and for the first time, I claim the body of an Egyptian lad and you are the sun god, washing over me like a brand new day. For the first time, December doesn’t feel like choking on poppy blossoms. For the first time, December is freeing as scattered pastel lights.

For the first time, my love, December rests on my skin — and it doesn’t hurt.

i am bone-tired and befogged with melancholia; i cannot wait to fall and bounce cheerlessly in a field of forlorn, arenaria flowers, all over the sunless forest floor. leave me be — a strange girl in a sleepy, run-down town. leave me be — a hopeless case in my own quiet apocalypse.

i mount my heart on a wall,
still and discolored
where my taxidermist hands had pressed.

it breathes life into dead walls:
a hanging irony made of
soft cyclamens
and the closed, white fist of a tormented girl.

i mount my teeth on a wooden wall,
write my letters,
pour salt on spaces where i used to stand;
may i not stand here
once again.

i mount my hands on a wooden wall;
they do not knock. i do not answer.

silent as a lamb — down to a pit,
i watch the sheer cliff of my back
from where i have jumped
and the sundry sorrows shrink
into black, blinking dots
like a hidden villain
exposed.
i fall over myself
like in a slow-moving dream —
lead-like it flows like the acheron river.
and here comes the ferryman.