Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
            I know    	     I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
 	     of knuckles   I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question  	
	                                       sadness is regal like that
                         golden and replaceable     once I wanted
a lineage of identical men   	    once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
       a pattern yet?               I practice the want of nothing	and fail
                                          I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
   	                                  I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?               Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face  	      and the lament is a valley
the light sags through       What do you do when you have
 	           lost Everything?       Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile  	      because someone told me I didn’t like it
    	   Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                 Flex the antonym of Missing   	     I avenge myself
Stretch my hands     I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                         ain’t no question       	I monarch
the lonely     I my own everything now	  I miss my love and
            it is an American grief     I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country         What is the odor of nothing            
            but my dominion in want of excess   	  I grin and pillars of bone flower
into sawed-off crowns      say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer    	   unfurling like a bicep 	 my lust a mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river  	I can feel it
      slowly drifting away from me 	The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone	   and my anthem populating my nose            
            with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once       My soverign's face is a riot
of diamonds whining    	This will be a beautiful death   and I am free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud        become the bride of my own sad light

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
"Things that are lost are all equal."
But it isn't true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you,
I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

She stands
In the quiet darkness,
This troubled woman,
Bowed by
Weariness and pain, 
Like an
Autumn flower
In the frozen rain. 
Like a 
Wind-blown autumn flower
That never lifts its head 
Again. 

Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble
in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.
How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold
with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance
to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?
Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.
My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.
A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.
Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.
The candles in our windows flicker
where your faces peer in, ask us
questions light cannot answer.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,   
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;   
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.   
There are a hundred places where I fear   
To go,—so with his memory they brim.   
And entering with relief some quiet place   
Where never fell his foot or shone his face   
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"   
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

The night before my father died
I dreamed he was back home,
and I in my old room
on the third floor, and he
was calling up to me
from the bottom of the stairs
some advice I couldn’t hear
or recall the next day when,
standing over him
back in the ICU
full of the chirping of machines
we had decided to unplug,
I remembered the dream
and heard him call my name.

1

If that someone who's me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, 
as he is, shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago that thing 
   I said?

If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were
   there then,
shouldn't he have warned me he'd even now devastate me for my
   unpardonable affront?

I'm a child then, yet already I've composed this conscience-beast, who
   harries me:
is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, 
   that he,

could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords
   of remorse,
and orchestrate ever-undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest
   of myself?


2

The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying
    their call,
take me along, and I'm sent out with the dead boy's brother and some 
   others to play.

We're joking around, and words come to my mind, which to my 
   amazement are said.
How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies?

is what's said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet,
   everyone stares,
and I want to know now why that someone in me who's me yet not me let
   me say it.

Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever
   upon me, 
it didn't matter that I'd really only wanted to know how grief ends,
   and when?


3

I could hear the boy's mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing
   then stopping.
Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her
   it would end?

Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, 
   still does, me, 
for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped 
   sometimes?

She didn't laugh, though, or I never heard her. How do you know when
   you can laugh?
Why couldn't someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but
   to explain?

The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn't hear anything more
   from inside.
The way now sometimes what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes, 
   though never really, forgets.

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

and Molly McCully Brown

Under my body’s din,
             a hum that won’t quiet,
I still hear what you’ve hidden
             in all the waves of sound:
each bead of pain
             that buries its head
like a black-legged tick,
             intractable but mine
to nurse or lure with heat.
             Please, tell me
what it means that I’ve grown
             to love the steady sound
of so many kinds of caving in,
             buckling down, the way
a body gives itself away
             like a sullen bride or the runt
who couldn’t latch? I know I’m just
             a hairline crack the music
leaves behind. I love
             the music, though I can’t keep it.

You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.