When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

Where would she go, because I would go there.
In the morning, nothing but a blanket and all her

absence and the feeling in the air of happiness.
And so much loneliness, a kind of purity of being

and emptiness, no one you are or could ever be,
my mother like another me in another life, gone

where I will go, night now likely dark enough
I can be alone as I’ve never been alone before.

A chance so close to zero, zero’s a baby
pool shoved against your screen door

thirty-six thousand feet below this airplane
where a preschooler chokes on a pretzel.

Every passenger stands, clutching
their necks as the mother scrapes her finger

down the girl’s throat. “You’re living in despair,”
the psychiatrist said back home. Long after

she forgets she once stopped breathing,
the girl asks if a plane ever falls from the sky.

“Sometimes it does,” you say. “Sometimes it does.”
One in eleven million. And when she says,

“They’ll catch us, the yellow trees,” you see
the start of a ginkgo tunnel: You haven’t lost

a baby. You go to work, sell tires, rinse
your feet at dusk in your makeshift plastic

pond, where soon all the suns will float:
the bright petals you won’t win, but find.

Acid washed

Jeans, bitten down

Fingernails, I’ve been

Uptight all

This week wishing

Invisibility,

Scented tissue

I can tease

Into flowers, same

As ever My heart-

shaped collapsible

Locket is still

Missing & I miss

Wearing it open,

I remember a black

Fog inside so

Combed through, trapped

And willingly

Shining me on