(z)
I just know somewhere someone is sitting alone on a porch, bruised
– which is yet another kind of sadness. These days I speak of myself in the future tense. I worry 
sometimes I will only be allowed to carry a glass of chai on my back and sing history in reverse –
a nautilus giving back the past where my body is a post-conflict faithfully used country. What 
careful seeds of spring have I spread with my mother’s voice – a sort of kindness enough to fill an 
orange house with songs that might end in birth. 
(y)
I just know somewhere a blue jay is sitting alone on a branch breaking, there is 
music and a sore thumb calling the wrong number. There is only this woman who 
is a city of bells. I mean. Today I’ve come to trust the sound of loss fading flat in 
time to meet my skin. I mean. I am drifting into the clouds just away from the rail 
where my sister who speaks to angels stands. Once a river spoke and spoke and I
am told does still. In all of this, I only know it’s the color of something – I've 
swallowed enough guilt to live like the loon on the surface and below.
(x)
I just know somewhere someone is sitting alone on a porch, thinking about her son.
It took a while for me to learn down here, hunger is another word for distance. I eat alone – and
the air around a name is a silent language of symbol and logic. Here, one of us is a key in the shape 
of my brother, the other is a pillar of salt cloaked in the sky’s marrow. And though I have touched 
a body not mine – even the softest part of me; something irreplaceable and fractured. The rain 
comes in smelling of cornfields and the sweet scrape of a match lighting the lamp of my mouth 
into a man; painted in hard lines in a place where he doesn’t belong. 
(w)
I just know somewhere a red cardinal is sitting alone on a branch breaking, repeating a 
singular song over and over as if wishing for a different outcome. And a space inaccessible 
inside me suddenly began to breathe. This is my way of saying: I am the deer and I am the 
apple bone. A ship undone by the luminous sky and frozen ground. I haven’t yet thought 
about what it might mean for everything to stay the same. I counted each second, I watch 
the sea turtles splash over coastal backyards as a season that still belongs to me; a shadow 
just out of frame until the sound of a door turned each room into an escargatoire of 
sunflowers crawling towards violet mountains.