The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock

Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,

A quiet offering to a quieter god

You spent several months weeping to the sky

Your small hands curled into your white frock



Work was left unattended in your colorful house

No food on the stove,

No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water

The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home

The home, austere and shrinking into the long street

Your helper comes to do all this

Your children understand in their small ways



You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil

Palm fronds wave in the wind

Salty sea air kisses your wet skin

Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to

Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness



Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise

The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,

Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children

Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom

Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind



Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation

My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings

I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry

I pop one into my mouth and chew

There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,

Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.

I.

All I can say is that it is a hum
Reverberant, droning, consistent
Quiet thrumming along the surface
Stirs me awake and then it fills me with
Ichor and I sip, sip, and sip (until I'm drunk).

All I can say is that it is a hum,
Quiet droning, a hushed whisper,
Loud screaming inside the head,
A piercing headache, sometimes a discordant wail.

II.

You sit on the porcelain lip of the tub
Hooded eyes lowered, your fingertips
Pressed together like the steeple of a church

I think: Yes, this is what Renaissance painters modeled angels after. Your skin is like a rose-tinged alabaster, your cheeks Suffused with blood. The painter took a measured time with you.

"Do you honestly think you'll be okay on your own?" You ask.

Silence, she greets you.

III.

Hasn't my mother violently
Ejected me from the nest
I'm only a few months old, a nestling
Wings awkward and clumsy
Beak agape for masticated food
(I'm not ******* ready yet)
Ejects me
Her beak threatens to pierce my shell

This is dejà vu.
I've conversed before
Different room, different domain,
Different speaker, a sicker listener
I'm as sick, sick as **** now

Mind, she hums, crescendo
Crescendo high like a choral piece
Orchestral, and this is resplendent
Everything is gleaming
Your face encased in a soft glow
Halo of light
Your face, cherubic,
His face, Romanesque, was sculpted like a Bronze Age statue.

"Your mother didn't give you the right set of tools. My mother at least gave me–" he falters.

IV.

I remember calling the ex 28 times in the span of 2 hours.
The policeman, he counted.
Thrashing on the floor, weeping like Persephone must've in Hades, like a fallen Mortal reborn as a minor goddess
Stripped me, he did though, of my wings
Avian feathers streaked with years-old blood

My tears, why yes, they're bleeding rivulets.
My ****-brown eyes alight on the bleach
Yes, sweet death

"Stop calling me. I'm ******* another ***** right now," the ex says.

V.

Memory is so faded,
Plays like a scratched and worn cassette tape

Mind is a-humming, humming, my mind is
Orchestral choir, church choir, Pentecostal
Now, I eat ichor, ravenous, now I am Closer to God and she is a woman,  
Draped in funeral attire
She weeps, soundless, a Seer

"I don't know," I say.

"The med isn't working," you reply
Cherubic face shifts and morphs
Melts into soft glow light,
One with the halo, is the halo

Nothing makes sense, everything else does too. My mind races, cassette tapes
Whirs, skips, images flash, I weep
Weep like Sisyphus
Eyes spilling rivers of penny-tinged
Crimson, sanguine ichor

One day he'll taste it and hate me,
Loathe me, the jade-eyed serpent
Poison-fanged
I'll clutch his scales until my fingers are Cut, welts, mottled bruises, fading scars
I will be punished, am punished
The illness, the eternal Boulder on the eternal hill, it rolls and rolls, my mouth agape

I await my cyclic fate ordained by the Higher God

VI.

How many men have I lured into the chamber?
Drunk on sweet wine or mead?
Petrified into osseous
Their gazes failing to avert from my Penetrative stare?

He was an errant General, beautiful but stupid, his mind a one way road, his temper unpredictable and flighty
Oh, how I loved the duality of him
We philosophized
Theorized on the Gods
Laughed at their follies
Wondered at the mysteries of the universe, Her deep annals

Oh, how I loved the physicality of him
Tight, corded muscle, his back like a Wound spring, Bronze hand
Grasping a silver sword

Hark! His rounded shield is lifted, my hideous reflection stares back at me
My eyes, widened, the cup of manna Clatters, soundly in the chamber
Reverberates
Bounces off my throne of skulls

How many men have I–?

VII.

"Can you honestly say that you can take care of yourself?" You ask from the place atop the lip of the porcelain tub. Your hands, a steeple, a church spire
Perhaps, you are a lesser God, perhaps we are all falling Lucifers, wingless, blinded by vengefulness and betrayal
Perhaps, he too is–?

"Am I an infant to you?" I ask.
The headache splits
The pain demands, claws at the side of my skull, dances across my nerves, liquid iron on my tongue

Because when did I?

Oh, Sisyphus you weep! You, who slaughtered so many!

Oh, Medusa, you wept, you beautiful serpentine harlot, you *****, you–
The choir is a strong crescendo, Ascending, ascending, ascending
Lowers like a thrumting and heavy bellow
Deep, rich, and full, timbre

"Everyone, all your life has said you were crazy, but I don't think you are, I–"

VIII.

The tapes skip, voices garbled, muffled, Indiscernible and distorted
Mind shrieks, lower now, quieter now, Barely audible, a fading whisper, your halo Recedes, soft glow dims

Your hands separate, the steeple, no, the Spire collapses.
Held breath hitches,
Serpentine tendrils become wisps of hair, Cloudlike

We are lesser gods, not quite mortal, not quite divine

The itch demands to be felt, protests
And I, I scream endless into a dark chasm
My voice, it does not call back to me
It does not–

"I don't know."

Do you ever just pine for someone?
The way they smile while talking to a loved one
That bright and easy laugh, the gleam in their eye, the knowing...the realization that you're watching them enjoy themselves from across the room

Or maybe you're just a spectral spectator
Flipping through photo albums, looking through photos that are a permanent snapshot
A moment in time
A second
A few minutes
Of them smiling among a gathering of friends

They're so happy, they're so brightened and unassuming in their youthful zeal
You can hear the bursts of laughter
The peals of it
Disjointed conversations among friends
Maybe one or two have passed on
Maybe they just lost touch with them

But you look at them now
All the same
You really look at them
You realize that they've changed so much from the person they were in those pictures

No more bright laughter
No more infectious smiles
No more disjointed conversations with gatherings of friends
No more college bar hopping
No more wandering the backstreets of Venice at night
Or Rome
Or Britain
Or Germany
No more spontaneous traveling

The light is dim now in their eyes
It's like the bulb inside of them has burned out

So...
You pine for them, for the person that they were yesterday, & days before, & years before you
entered their life

After your arrival, came a burial

Somewhere along the way
With the unspoken hurt
& unprocessed trauma
They died

And so ...
You grieve

Hello old friend,
With your tall sweeping evergreens
Towering almost endlessly
Into a blue clear sky
The endless swell of traffic
Cars peeling down the street
The smell of roasted coffee beans
From some hole-in-the-wall cafe
The obvious transplant donning an umbrella in the Autumnal warm rain
The light sprinkling of water enough
To nurture the verdant green

Hello old friend,
Mt. Rainier, she greets me,
Looming ever majestically
Over expanses of tree and road
Her white peaks cresting over
Fields of blossoming flowers
The tulip fields scattered across the sloping
Skagit Valley, her vineyards spanning for miles and miles

Hello old friend,
Seattle's grungy nature
Masked by her streets of trendy
Cafes and farm-to-table restaurants
Her mom and pop cafes
Her canvas gray dress marred by graffiti
And street tags
The busker on the street corner panhandling for change
The homeless sheltering under a cardboard blanket outside of a Starbuck's
The transplant with the umbrella stopping down to drop change in their jar
The crumpled dollar
The locals who pointedly ignore him on their way to work, to school, back home, to somewhere...anywhere...
The constant dazed bustle
The stench and pungent odor of ****
Curling around every seedy corner and
Affluent street crossing

Hello old friend,
It's been a while
Let me nestle into your newness
A new coast greets me across the horizon
Replaced by homespun everything
Pastoral fields where the bovine and equine reside

Hello old friend,
I suppose you're home now
I suppose you're home...

when you sing,
you want it to bloom out of the garden
in your bones and out of your heart,
and you want it to be like
you were thirteen again and you had blooming
sunshine in your face

you scaled trees, climbed rocks
skinned your knees
wild and as brazen as the first kiss you
stole from some girl
spattered freckles on her face
you counted with your lips
(you got to 14)

erected a monument
out of your garden but it was bare
your bones,
dried husks

who can pull you out of that water?
i can't...
neither can she...