awake
The furnace-black odor of cigarettes
made acid shadows where you slept —
it took me days to smell the cotton clean.
It’s a scarred pleasure of mercy
to stop feeling you
near me, finally.
I may have spit the waxwork gristle of collapsed probability,
but tinfoil dreams still wire through
my unteachable
delta rhythm
sleep.
Exiles
I watch you at Nell’s wake;
You cover your mouth
as if your heart were some restless bird
that might fly wild from it.
There is a tremor in me, then;
it points to some dark epicenter,
slurred with depth and gravity.
It’s the antithesis of flight, but no less evasive.
And then there’s Nell.
I’m on the couch, you’re near the buffet when
an understanding passes through us;
I can tell you’re remembering, too, how surgeons
muddled through her excess of tissue;
worked the too-quick math of her remaining time;
named the bloody bits and unwanted pieces of her
with grim precision; and
understood things for us
because we could not.
So here we are;
By grace of wing and grit and memory
we lean into the thermals of our sorrow,
pressing toward some relief,
exiles in the high and low places
where Nell is not.
