Your Sky
In German, the word for heaven is the same as the word for the sky. Himmel. I know you would’ve loved that. But I take that knowledge, and I imagine dying, and I imagine your soul floating up, up, up and away, only to fall short of breaking the seal that separates the Earth from Space. That’s scary—souls floating around like balloons, never given the mercy to pop, dodging planes and freebirds, thinning out as plumes of smoke and exhaust mystify their view and break them down as they fill the world as litter.
Maybe you’d like to know where I am, because I don’t know how great your sense of direction is from the void, or the eternal party above the earth, or from the urn I think you’re shoved in. I’m in Ohio, writing for no pay, and I keep thinking about all the people I need to call. You’re in my phone, still, in the form of fifty unplayed voicemails. I know, because I counted. Mom says I shouldn't feel guilty, because people get complicated, and now I believe that guilt is a mother because she holds you tight, so tight, and she doesn’t let you go until you tell her that you’re through. Because you need to be through. And moving on is a rusty boxcar, but I don’t know what that means yet because I haven’t moved on.
I know you aren’t buried in the ground, but I visited the graveyard with a Diet Coke in my hand to be closer to you. I hate Diet Coke, and I think I hate prayer, but I know you loved it because you believed it saved people, so I prayed for you and your skyward soul, for your complications and your voicemails and your pleading for me to say more to you than “I’m good. I miss you too. Love you.” And now, I have to do the unfair thing, which is to look for you, but only long after you’ve passed. So please, give me a sign. Possess a child, make him give me a balloon animal of your soul. Go crazy, send a flood of phone calls in my direction, make drinking Diet Coke illegal with your new celestial party powers. I know I’m not making sense, but sometimes I talk just to fill empty space, sometimes I speak because the quiet reminds me of how I shouldn't have been around you.
Tell me if my words are making it to your himmel, your heaven, your sky, tell me if the prayer I say when I am forced to reckon with your death really protects me. And does a prayer last for eternity? If I pray, and tell God that I love you and that I’m sorry, would that prayer still work on the days I won’t be able to remember what it was like to hear that you were gone? Really gone? When you get the chance, tell me, and be honest: tell me if my words ever made it to your sky.
My Diabetic Grandmother Checks Her Blood Sugar and I Wonder What Has Become of Me
Love is almost like a biding,
biding the time of the slow, no,
deadbeat, heart. If I cried each
time my grandmother pricked
her finger to make way for sugar,
I wouldn’t be saved,
I’d just be salty.
She assures me that it tastes good,
like salt, so I prick her finger,
wait for the warmth of red iron to
blossom. I taste the flower on my
tongue. I remember this taste as I twirl
dance with my brother, our shared
musicblood spilling after I knock
my nosebridge against our coffee table,
the wood drinks drops of me, I stagger.
I watch on the television as girl pulls
out heart, eats it, organ still beating, undead.
I watch and I think, I have done the same,
I have tasted blood without sugar, I have
been the outward pouring of pulse, I have
torn through heartbreak and bled through
better days and felt what is no longer there
beating against me.
I am not blossoming,
I am just twirling, pulsing outwards like
the voices I let destroy me. They tell me,
pulse of beatings in my ear, you are biding.
Biting down on time as it falls and sinks
on, into my tongue like bitters, I swallow.
By the Grace of Malleability
So much of my life is soft,
like it’s on the cusp of rot.
Like if I don’t hold my own on the
saddle, I’ll be kicked off and forced
to writhe around in the dirt, aching,
bitter, wishing for the fall never to
have happened.
I’m traveling along a beaten road,
looking towards rotting houses and
feeling like a fuse has been lit on
the end of my tail. Peeking over
a fence is a peach, its bright
radiance of tan and pink beckoning
me, standing out against dilapidation,
against the undeniable threat of
living, of being. And instead of
ignoring this threat of life, I
hold it in my hands, having
plucked it from a knotty branch,
leaving a plume of leaves at my feet.
The peach molds to the weight of
my hands. It squelches before I’ve
even taken a bite, almost quivering
at the sight of me. This malleability
throws me into some place inexplicable,
some place where all I know to do is to
push, grieve in the moment,
furrow my brow and squeeze,
squeeze, until the veins of my fingers are
pronounced, funneling blood through
my arteries, hands shaking at the
beat of my heart.
The juice leaks, spurts, runs down
the hairs of my arm. I drop the peach,
what's left of it, onto the earth. I am born and will die
by the earth. By the grace of my sweat, I am alive.
