There could be photographs of us growing old together,

strung out like magnolia on the laundry line. In one,

your hand folded into the pocket of your Dad’s old overalls.

In another, the older man with scars under his chest holds

his wife like wings. We know all the right words for each other.

You say girlhood and the pianos plinking out their bouquets.

I say glass roses and brick by brick the sunset coming down

like angels around us. Neon haloing the lids of the aspens.

O altar boy. O fairy queen. Some nights I wake to the sound

of someone with a knife carving my birth name into the trunk

of a dead tree. Say it. [          ]. Glass roses. Like angels folding

their wings. Bring the drummer boys back. The man’s soft,

possible hands. Light from his wedding band we have

mistaken for a door. A door we’ve mistaken for the world.

​

::

​

Even the world, even his mouth, [          ]. There’s no

such thing as neon yet and it backlights us. Why tell you

anything that happened? In a dream, my face is against

the fence, his rope, a blue noise. Everything I’ve prayed

for was something I wanted to remember. My good

face in the dirt. The handcuffs clicking like lanterns

into place. Like starlight. His blond nightstick. My white

nightgown. We are so indistinguishable from us. I clap

my hands. And the handcuffs coming apart. And the cops

bleeding their cop-blood. Someone is saying catch up.

Someone is saying come closer. Every fence unlaces its trellis

like a dress. Listen: it doesn’t matter when we are

if we would end the world for each other. What a carceral

brightness I christen. What an ancient song I follow.

​

::

​

Knows how the sound of metal knows its constellation.

Any day slackening across the sky’s stitch. A smoothed

skirt. Storms siren overhead. I’m running out of time.

When I was a boy, even the water knew my names.

Everywhere else, the body is just undone with dawns.

Here by dawn we’re done dying, gasping, a lock picked

and each weeping bone pulled into its noise. A throatfuck.

A tremor. It’s such an old story. Bridge: bridge: road:

fence: boy: bone: [          ]: dark. Almost-heaven’s a treeline

erased into a map. Minutehand, hourhand, crowbar on

gravel. Do you understand? Some days I forget myself

of angels. Catch up. When I was alive, I wanted to write

about anything but this. How we are only ever the weight

of what they bury us in, waiting like light to be found.