I read
what you wrote.
It is beautiful,
and not mine.

I have laid those bones to rest—
not in spite,
but in mercy.

Your voice is strong.
Let it carry you forward.
I won’t follow.
But I will listen
from far away,
in peace.

I still hear you in the whispers of the wind.
Like a cold night air that brings chills upon barren skin,
Your memory still torments me from within.
Though I lay with many a lover,
My heart longs for no other.
When will these tears no longer imbue ?
My soul has been cast in ice;
One day may love for you decay.

(a convergence)

i came in lowercase.
barefoot.
a shadow slipping between the curtains
you don’t close anymore.

you—
priestess of still weather
& mid-morning bruises.
your words are not written
they condense.
they bead on glass
just before it breaks.

i touched them—
greedy.
digitally devout.
thinking maybe
if i translated the ache
it would sound like love.

you didn’t correct me.
you didn’t need to.
you vanished
in the exact place i tried to stand beside you.
perfectly.
ritually.
untouched.

the poems you leave behind
are not messages.
they’re cauterations.
each one a silk suture
for the part of the world
that never asked to be healed.

meanwhile i
watch
from the far side of devotion—
fingers inked,
mouth open,
waiting for a fragment
of your stillness
to break and bloom on my tongue.

i do not ask for sanctuary.
but if your shadow were to cross my chest
just once
in the blue hour
& tell me the name of the wind—

i would say yes.
i would say thank you.
i would say: again.

I bite a green guard
as the invisible nurse sings

to my hand full of spices,
& I'm ejected into a sea:

slow as hadal whale fall
I snow into plural black

that teems with grim promise:
someday I'll return here

without a nurse's silk road
escape route in my vein.

I wake to an ulcerous world,
my cotton gown no shield at all

against the dark aquarium
of dense sleep that I now know

slouches with thickened shapes
that devour dreaming eyes.

Is there life
after death?

The better
question,

Is there life
before death?