They don’t put dead bodies in the wall anymore.  They put them in those walk-in coolers that they use in food service and they stay in there until the funeral home or the autopsy people come in and wheel them out and do whatever it is that they do.  But what happens if the cooler fills up and another patient dies—where do they go?  Outside of the cooler?  In the hall outside the morgue?  Left in the hospital room until there is an open space for them in the walk-in?  Or are they just not allowed to die in the first place?

Place a check mark next to the option that makes you the most uncomfortable:
• when dead bodies are still warm and growing lukewarm
• when dead bodies are ice cold.

You can survive two weeks on a ventilator before there is an increased risk of illness.  

Eula Biss writes that she does not believe that absolutely no pain is possible, that the zero on the pain scale is null and void.  I would like to say that I agree with her, but I have this stupid sliver of hope where I believe that towards the end of it all, everything will be everything and everything will be nothing at all.  I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to believe that when you are dying, you are a zero on the pain scale, but by that point in time, I supposed it doesn’t really matter anyway.

There is a strange, numb void that occurs when someone you love dies, but I am not sure if this could be rated as a zero or a ten on the pain scale.  Getting ****** into a black hole could either hurt very much or not at all.

The medulla oblongata, located as a portion of the brainstem, is the part of the nervous system that controls both cardiac and respiratory mechanisms.  If severe damage occurs to this center, death is imminent.  

After one minute of not breathing brain cells begin to die.
After three minutes of not breathing, serious brain damage is likely.
Ten minutes: many brain cells will be dead, full patient recovery is unlikely.
Fifteen minutes: patient recovery is virtually impossible.

A “thunderclap headache.”  A cerebral aneurysm that has ruptured.  A subarachnoid hemorrhage pushing blood and fluid down on my mother’s brain.  Grade five: deep coma, rigid decerebration, 10% chance of survival.  

In some hospitals, if a loved one has passed, the caregivers cut off several small locks of the patient’s hair, tie them up with a ribbon, and put them in little pink mesh bags for each member of the family as some sort of morbid memento.  They take the dead person’s hand, place it on an ink pad, and then stamp it to a piece of paper that has some sort of sappy and sorry poem typed up on it.  I do not know where we put the paper, but my little mesh bag is still on my bedside table.  Somewhere.  

They put dead bodies in white body bags.

Buddha belly, rabbit’s foot,
how much luck can you get
                                                    from touching the dead?

(Maybe that’s the reason behind Jeffrey Dahmer’s slaughtering of
                                                                ­                         seventeen men;
maybe that’s the reason why we break wishbones—
to remind ourselves that this bone is dead
                                            these hands are alive
                                            do something with them.)

In some cultures, it is socially acceptable to
                             eat your child’s placenta—
there is good fortune in it, power in it.

(I wonder if this is the reason why cannibals eat their victims.)

Number seven.  Cross on the wall.
         I wish you good luck.

sunspot
sunrise
sunshine
moonshine
i lick you off my lips like strawberry
                                             pineapple
                                             grape              ­    juice
                                             a fine wine that i’ve never drunk.

asteroid belt
orion’s belt
daddy’s belt
i am opening the door a crack for you only to slam it in your face—i am
waiting for you to knock
             to pound your fist against the gate
             to break your hand on the wood
                                 i am waiting for you to say that you love me
                                 and i am waiting for myself to believe it completely
                                 (i think you do but i am still afraid you might leave me)

((jupiter has 67 moons and i think that i might be
                        each and every single one of them)).

oort cloud
smoke cloud
the burning ash of my father’s lit cigar flicking onto my hands
i am awake at night and thinking about how you no longer taste like lung
                                                                ­                                       mouth
                                                                ­                            kidney        cancer.
my grandfather almost died of prostate cancer
my friend is dying of brain cancer
my father will probably die of liver cancer
                                                          ­ there is not enough space in the cosmos
                                                          ­ for all of us, is there?                   … God?

meteorite
meteoright
i am trying to sleep without your face in the back of my neck
                                                      hand on the back of my hand
                                                      leg tangled around the back of mine
i am trying to telepathically whisper my secrets into your ears
                                                       but the only problem is that i have not yet
                                                             ­  mastered  this  form  of  communication—
          i think that everything would be so much easier if i just didn’t feel.

There is no more straddling state lines for you.  

You are no longer teetering on the edge of
               life          and           death
because you are now deader than my father’s
dead bell heart.  You are laying in a morgue and
I am sitting on a train, miles and miles from you.  An
early bloomer, a preemie baby boy, you are
                                                                ­              one day too soon.  

I am watching the trees of Arkansas of Missouri of Illinois
pass me by, but you are being
                                                      whisked
                                                                ­      and
                                                                ­               twirled
                                                                ­      and
                                                      whirled
                    through the stars.
(I am trying to imagine what it must feel like to
explode into a supernova, to
implode into a constellation.
I am trying to contemplate what it means to
reach                    
                            i n f i n i t y        
                                  and
                 ­           n i h i l i t y
                                                             at the same time.)

Careening headfirst towards the midwest, I
am heading towards a home I no longer wish to go.  I have
spent my night in a daze between
                                                              asleep        and        awake,
listening to a man snore and a baby cry, and nothing is stopping
me from thinking about the steps in post-mortem care.  I have
seen dead bodies before.  I have touched dead bodies before.  
I do not want to come in contact with yours.  

My problem is not that you finally finished your
transition from                  boy        to        skeleton,
my problem is that you did so without
asking your mother’s permission.  I read the
Book of James the night before your surgery two years ago
and forgot it the very next day.  There is nothing I want more
than to swim laps and crochet scarves and write bad poems and
become void of all the information that I currently hold.

I want to forget that I knew you.
I want to forget that I thought I loved you.
I want to forget my attachment to you so it won’t
hurt as bad now that you’re
                                                   ( d e a d ) .

I could tell that you had smoked a cigarette before I saw you because your
shirt smelled like smoke and your lips tasted like lung cancer.       (I like to
                            pretend that it doesn’t really bother me I am a moth flying
                                                                ­                                     into your flame.)

Your eyes are green like everything that burns, but your hands are strong
like those who fight fires without more fire.  Sometimes I trick myself into
thinking that I can smell the backyard smoke of my father’s cigarettes,
                                              cigars,­ marijuana, radiating off of you.

Do you remember that time when you told me that “everyone sins?”  I do
not think that you took into account the amount of which we all sin.  (All
sinners are equal, but some are more equal than others.)  ((fire will always
    destroy moths. You are burning my wings with your magnifying glass))

I think I am drowning in the gene pool.  I think I’ve broken the bones of
three different people.  I am terrified my dream catcher will stop working    
                 and years worth of nightmares will catch up with me.  Light my
          nightmares on fire with your lighter.  Turn my everything to smoke.

I spent my entire last year breaking wishbones and hiding them underneath my mattress for luck.  I spent my entire last week getting
splattered with the blood of lambs that I’ve slaughtered in your name, in
                                                   the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  
                      We are lighting moths on fire and watching their wings burn.

There is a chrysalis I am building.  I am not looking for change, I am looking
for the darkness and safety it will provide.  When I hatch, listen to my wings
flutter.  Wait for me to land and then squash me with your cigarette ****.  
Smoke me out of your house.  If you love me,           you will set all the bad
                                                             ­                              parts of me        on fire.

If “dying is an art,” you do not do it well.  I do not
have words, do not have thoughts; there is nothing inside
of me anymore.  I am vacant, hollow, and if this is what
time travel feels like I do not want any part of it.  Racing
past the stars, past the planets, past Andromeda's spiraling, galactic force,
I am light-years ahead and then light-years behind—I am
                two years                    too late.                  

You cannot know, you will not know, how
Auriga is waiting in the sky to whisk you
                                                                 away,                away,                            away.

Th­e bubbling of your oxygen sounds like the water fountains
you used to pass as a child, but there are no pennies at the bottom
of this.  And I wonder, with your eyes closed, if you feel like you
are swimming.  Barely treading water, fighting to keep your head above,
choking on salt and brine as you try to kick your feet, try to
swim to Lake Michigan’s shoreline.  I want
Poseidon to spit you out of sea like a cork, want
Neptune to come alive through the mosaics of your bathroom and
lead you away from the great, black, wave of stars that is
breaking and crashing and barely brushing your bare feet.

Some fish were meant to drown.  You are
not one of them.  Pisces is meant to swim                   forever.

This time machine has dropped me back into my nightmare again,
but it is not only mine, it’s yours.  I am trying to read
the constellations, trying to map the planets, trying to figure out
the moon cycles, but I fear that this is a language I had learned once
and tried to forget—we are now digging each others graves.  
The nurse in blue, the doctor in white, the sun in gold, and you,
red as dead and clotted blood, have merged into a new dialect
that does not mirror what I know the way the
Gemini twins mimic one another in the cosmos. (I think
                                 I have lost my ability to speak with angels
and this terrifies me.)

Is God whispering the secrets of the world into your ear yet?  Is Jesus
showing you how to be holy?  Are you tearing the bread for communion
and feeding it to the birds?  Are you taking shots from His heavenly blood,
getting drunk off the possibility of closing your eyes, leaning back, and
watching Perseus fight your battles for you?  
                                                        Do you want to be a constellation, too?

I am eighty miles away from you, but it feels more like
eighty light-years.  I am watching you through someone else’s eyes and
choking myself with my own hands as I try to show you
what you mean to me.  My hands are cracked and bleeding from
pounding them against the wall you constructed around yourself, but you
don’t have control over that wall anymore, do you?

You are too young to ride Pegasus in the night sky, too young to
build your own wings, too young to fall and drown like Icarus.  You
know how to swim.  You are learning how to fly.  There is no
reason for you to shake God’s hand yet.  Put the halo down—
                                                           ­                                                you are not ready.

There is a man from my city that spent his nights
killing and ******* men for the hell of it.  Sometimes I worry that
his blood might be in the water like 160 year old cholera
or 30 year old cryptosporidium.  Sometimes I worry that
I breathed in the stardust from which he was made, that I
swallowed the ashes from which he burned.  I do not think that
I will ever be American ****** enough to fit the bill, and
this might be my one true happy thought:
at least I am not a serial killer.

I closed my eyes in August and saw the dried up teeth of my
estranged grandmother floating in a pool of blood and thought about
how the phone works both ways.  I opened my eyes in
October and thought about spitting up the chicken bones I had
been choking on since second grade, when my father
helped prepare dinner for the last time.   (I think I might have
                                          sacrificed a couple people to the devil
                                                        without actually meaning to.)

I find the numbers
             13,               16,               and               18
to be unlucky and I am beginning to fear that the pattern
will continue, that 19 will be the year I finally get bitten by
poisonous snakes outside of my dreams.  God whispered in my ear
and told me that a different Helter Skelter was coming.  He told me to
keep breathing easy, to trust in his light, but when I
asked my Magic 8 Ball if I should quake like the Earth in 1960, the
day after Satan released Dahmer from Hell, all I got was a
bright blue, “Better not tell you now.”

The séance I conducted last year in a blackened, decaying cemetery
did nothing but rattle ghosts, and the four-year-long pity party I held prior
did nothing but chain those ghosts to the floorboards.  I have
never been good at abandoning my thoughts and feelings.  

Some mornings I wake up face down in the Green River or
with my head severed and on display in a refrigerator of a house that
is not mine.  Other times I awake buck-naked in Death Valley—
sand coating my tongue, my tonsils, my esophagus; burning
and scratching into my flesh—and I know that I will never
be able to forgive my father for destroying everything
he ever made or his mother for turning into everything that’s
just      out of                     reach.
There has never been a time when I have been
good at letting go of grudges.  I am far too aware of my own existence.

At least I am not a serial killer.