Writing

Dear Mom

You once told me

I was the king of fireflies.

We saw them drift

above the hills,

as our hands purple with dusk.

Blackberries ripened in our palms,

their sweetness hid the thorn.

You woke me at dawn,

said ajde' before the deer return,

before the garden forgets

our small devotion to hunger.

Our hands disappeared into the bramble.

We could not tell

berry from blood.

Sometimes the thorn slid deep,

opened a vein.

You never stopped.

You said

all those slaughters,

all those wars,

were never for nothing.

You told me about the day

you first held a caramel,

how you did not eat it,

how you gave it to your sister,

the way you left that cake for me.

And that,

that is everything I own now.

I keep asking

if the thorns still hurt

as you give me the gloves.

You said

The past tense of hurt

is not hurted.

Maybe the time after pain

did not stop hurting.

You made a strudel

from the jam we boiled.

You taught me

that in a house full of bread

it is hunger

that stays,

not people.

That is why I am not there.

I am at war

with everything

except you.

Forgive me.

You said bacon

was the only thing

that saved you

during chemo.

I am vegan now.

I eat silence.

I eat what we left behind.

The fireflies are gone.

Winter has come.

The hills remain

quiet, enormous,

as if waiting

for us to begin again,

to reach once more

into the thorn,

searching

for something sweet.

Twist

The fumes follow me

as if they know my name.

I breathe in

only to breathe out,

yet it doesn't leave.

It's not the taste of nicotine that stays,

nor the soft bruise of herbs

we ground down to dust,

but you

linger in the quiet of my skin.

I wonder if I was too careful

or not enough;

rolling the paper imperfectly,

letting air slip through

so it could press its small signature

inside me.

proof you existed here

once,

close enough to almost understand me.

A fox waits somewhere in the forest

and I tell myself

I am not there;

I only wanted to speak

in the same language as you did.

I never said I would go beyond grinding,

and yet there I was,

not asking

not pausing

falling into the dark of it.

So, here I am.

I still see you

on the bathroom floor,

your legs arranged

like a boutique mannequin.

the blood so red

it felt like the world finally admitted

how much it could hurt you.

the room dim,

night-shift hospital dim,

leaving a bitterness in my mouth,

peeling the memory open

the way we used to open

those cheap chocolates

we called our munchies.

and even then

I searched for something

to hold.

and there it was;

a sound buried deep

in your chest,

ringing.

you held me.

and I listened.

I was calm and only sought

the left-over scent of cigarettes

and cheap alcohol.

that smell of you.

I remember how it taught me to listen

the way I listened when you asked me

if I want to try

so I tried

but I kept trying.

Dear Ivano

You are back in the house again.

The one without a facade.

The one the war forgot to finish.

You move carefully.

There is a gun sleeping above the wardrobe.

There is a knife in the garage that already knows how to leave a body.

You learn the distance between plates before they become air.

You learn how blood looks before it is named.

You learn how walls hold their breath.

You are something made, then made again to survive.

Which means you are somebody’s child.

Which means if you open your eyes you will still be here,

sharing a room, sharing a silence, learning which sounds mean hide.

The men are laughing now.

Their hands are red with pig’s blood and intestants.

They eat with their fingers.

They drink.

The table breaks first.

Then the wall.

Then the night.

You watch the walls forget themselves under new paint.

You watch the color dry unevenly, as if memory refuses symmetry.

The war ends.

But no one tells the house.

You watch the walls forget themselves under new paint.

You watch the color dry unevenly, as if memory refuses symmetry.

The war ends.

But no one tells the house.

You come home from church.

A man is folding his wife into the ground.

The children are learning origami.

You sit with the others and listen the way you listen to rain.

Another man arrives with dogs, with a bird that cannot fly,

with a rooster that still believes in morning.

He snaps the heads off the believing things. It is funny.

Someone turned seven that day.

Glass everywhere. A hole in the table learning how to be a mouth.

Walls that have seen this before.

You keep standing in the minefield, perfectly still.

You want someone to say hey.

Hey. Look at how carefully you are moving.

You want someone to say

this will be past tense soon.

That one night you will pack a bag,

a paperback, a borrowed weapon,

a self small enough to carry.

That the safest place was always the thoughts above your head.

That it is fair, it has to be, how our hands hurt us,

then teach us how to leave.

You want someone to say

you can love the world until the world is gone

and still keep your breath.

You can walk away.

Even now.