The box under my bed containing things stolen during your wake. Your mother still holds one – even though it’s a sin, your suicide, the soft side of your hand hit me in fear. I save the print on paper

airplanes – flying with the same brevity as moths, yesterday, your obituary – I steal that, too – your mother too busy to notice – me there; a sin, your suicide, the soft side of soil. At your grave I have not visited –

The last time I was in your house, your parents were on vacation but still we hid in your room – away from the crosses nailed to the wall. We hid from all the holy yesterdays nailed in Jesus – to a cross. I steal the cross hanging over your bed. The room washed clean – your sin, your suicide,

the soft side of your last breath. Maybe we will understand when I’m older, more thoughtful, and you would love me because I’m so thoughtful –

Sitting at your desk I find in the drawer a photo of us. Taken at a Halloween in July party. You, Clark Kent, hidden identity under your suit and there comes a sudden burst of knowing what guilt now knows. You kept a napkin stained red: remnants from a pie filled with cherry preserves – it’s perverse – I take it anyway. Place it –

in the memory box under my bed when instead I should be helping you change lightbulbs, lending a hand, moving that snail back out the backyard where the soft side of soil freshly tilled doesn’t seem so horrible –

A bruise swelling the soft side of my side crashing into the side of the liquor cabinet. I steal your mother’s finest champagne – pop! – toasting my 23rd birthday on a seven mile walk home. I am drinking the bottle whole, straight from the bottle. Following the curves of curbs with the soft side of suicide on my mind, my

fingertips touching extra guitar string I stole from your guitar case. I am dismissing those thoughts as thinking.

Here we are, 
lonely kids.

Here we are,
running through crops as braided & carefully tightened
as our ethnic heads, past the sunken tractors, 
past the shadows stretched over industry.

Here we are,
lonely kids
at the center of the dinner table,
eating our shadows in three neat courses,
full of (too many?) glass hearts whittling 
tea lights into single 
lips, blowing lopsided kisses.

Here we are, 
still pretending to drown 
in the community pool because no one will notice,
the usual angles of our panic bent 
through the water into shreds of light.

Here we are,
lonely kids
masturbating in the eye sockets of ghosts planted
deeply in the homes of stale 
strobe lights Here we are 
quiet as catapults in unnamed fields,
mighty in our guts of gore Here

we are
lonely kids 
whose fathers left us with nothing
but the grass we were born on, left
mothers who didn’t realize that their 
kids are the opposite of solitude, 
kids who want and need 
but don’t and can’t kids 
like lone wolves missing vocal chords
listen to us,

listen to us: the perfect equation,
nothing special but nothing undesirable,
just as available, just as there
as an unlonely kid would be but 
fuck a lonely kid,
who wants and who needs 
the wants and needs of a 
lonely kid? Who eats
the staple of a question mark and who
pets a dog that bites 
and cries after, licking and licking 
apologies into the skin?

Look, 
here they are.
Pick a lonely kid from the gutter,
gently quiet their fingers from their hair,
take their hand—realize it’s as wide 
as a homeless man’s—and
walk with them through
those cobblestoned streets,
say, with kindness, 
“Do you want a piece of gum?”

It’s 4:30 PM in Ithaca on a Saturday,
nearly Christmas, and all through the apartment
the dense stench of a bender heaved
until dry, until I swear to God there’s nothing
left inside me, until blood—
a gory pool drooled on the fitted sheet,
on the Michael Kors blouse I never took off,
the floral comforter, more on the floor.
Time to play detective again.
I’m suspect. A text message from my poker buddy:
Your keys are in your purse by the couch.
Text me to say you’re still kicking.
Cat’s get nine lives. How many
for drunk bitches who never eat dinner?
I gulp applesauce straight from the jar
to gentle the night’s damage. Strip the bed,
pull a sleeping bag over the bare mattress.
On TV “The Walking Dead” are zombies.
I fall over in the shower. I am living
my uncle’s death march. When his mistress found him,
his fire liver burned out, a bloodbath for one
retched across his second bankruptcy home,
did she feel relieved? I can sing hello coffin
to the full-length mirror and write a grant proposal
for spring. Multitasking is the new norm.
The sun’s already quit today. What is a darkness
and what is a black hole? What is a cousin
and what is a pallbearer? Some questions are stupid.
I’ve got pickles that’ll outlast this lease.
I’ve got a half-dozen presents under someone’s tree.

It so happens, I am tired of being a woman.
And it happens while I wait for my children to grow 
into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks
of summer sun have gone,

drained between gaps into gutters,
and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes
cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied
if I could draw from language
the banquet of poets.

If I could salvage the space in time
for thought and collect it
like a souvenir. I can no longer 
be timid and quiet, breathless

and withdrawn.
I can’t salve the silence.
I can’t be this vineyard
to be bottled, corked,
cellared, and shelved.

That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth,
growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat.
It claws its way through the edges of an age 
I never planned to reach

and diffuses my life into dullness— 
workout rooms and nail salons,
bleach-white sheets on clotheslines,
and treacherous photographs of younger me
at barbecues and birthday parties.

I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage. 
I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick
and I gamble on what’s expected. 
And what to become. And how
to behave: mother, wife, brave.

(The last time you were home you had a cut on your forearm.
You move to another city, where it healed.
On a visit back, 
your fingers stumbled across said mark and begin to scratch at it.)

This is that moment where “home” has become nothing more than a scar metaphor.

Upon arriving to this city,
I remembered how much I missed the cold.

How miserable this weather really is.
How much I love how miserable this weather really is.

Like a bad boy.
Like how the sun,
leans on the clouds,
like it’s saying:
“I am not trying to be here.
Like I have better places to be.
But I am here now.
So, 
you’re welcome.”

I remembered how much I love getting warm.
Like how I wore five layers the first day here.
Like how I only wore my own skin in my childhood bed every night.

I then remember this city stashes a lot of fear.

Broken evenings, 
dawns torn from notebooks.

Turn corners to find tucked away resentment,
a failed sisterhood, a troubling weight,
a sense of “too familiar.”
Ex lovers.

(Point here)

See this flesh.
This flesh is growing back.
Let’s say it’s growing up.

Like me.
As best as it can.

What’s home and scars metaphors without a pinch of love.

Leads me to here.
Where I think about you.

Think about how I want to break you.
Like a wishbone.
Like I was hoping you would ask me where I’ve been.

sarah i am an
unremarkable
woman a
honey-drudger
like the rest
there is no
room in my
belly for
anything
extraordinary
no opal wings
languages
combs i am the
poet the jam-
maker i have
no time no
words there is
nothing left to
wring from the
clock sarah
what happens
when we turn
thirty i feel it
coming i never
imagined
anything after i
feel like that’s
when women
start sweeping
start watching
their waist lines
start becoming
bees.

When they talk of fatherhood
I hear words like diaper and swaddle and sleepless.

Their eyes are alight with the simple joy
of tiny humans with tiny hands and tiny feet
and round bellies.

But even grandparents can’t prepare you
for this kind of vocabulary.

Neonatal Intensive Care.
Fetal Cardiology.
Pulmonary Stenosis.
Aortic Valve.
Surfactant therapy.
Pneumothorax.
Collapsed lung.
PICC Line.
Art Line.
Gavage.
Apnea.
Bilirubin.
Bradycardia.

I learned the color-coded line graphs
of my children before I knew their eyes.

The green number is the heartbeat.
176 and rising.

The blue one shows oxygenation
of the blood. We aim for 100.

The white line measures breaths
per minute. Her lungs are working hard.
We want her numbers below 60.
I see 93. I see 102. I see 88.

I see chest X-rays every morning.
Echocardiograms for her sister.

Helen and Molly.My baby girls.
My daughters.

Who learned borrowed blankets
and a chorus of machines before they learned
their mother’s hand.

I don’t remember any of this
in my books. I read so many books.

On the eighth day at the hospital
I remember the word exhausted.

How it came with a smile
from a father who knew four a.m. feedings
and burp cloths and breast pumps.

But there’s no way to prepare
for the kind of tired it takes to sleep
through the siren of your daughter
not breathing.

Because you’ve heard it before.
Because you’re not a nurse.

Because the first cries your body learned
were polyrhythmic warnings
that something was wrong
and you could do nothing
to stop it.

First time brushing my teeth in California
Still wearing the Philadelphia clothes

First time with the flat floss this side
of the Mississippi.

Thanks to my childhood I
know how to spell Mississippi.

There’s a toaster with a face
in my office.

Almost convinced my wife to
buy it food.

First time with the minty sensation
in my mouth since it

took a hundred days for the airport shuttle
to bring us to our car.

That toaster wants bread!
That toaster wants bread!

Just read an article about a woman
who hasn’t used shampoo in six years.

Maybe that’s the way.
Don’t do any of the things they tell you to do.

Don’t drink for thirty years.
Don’t put dead animals in your mouth.

Don’t leave a jar of Cheerios on your desk
unless you’re prepared for the surprise

every time you see it.
Breathing? Breathing?

Are you kidding me?
I get my oxygen in my own way!

Two weeks ago, you say you ordered a pizza from the future due to daylight savings time. You say, “Time travel is real, Zach.” You hold up your phone, the app open, and I thank you for reminding me of daylight saving time, even if you say savings with an –s when most editors prefer daylight saving time.

I think of time travel in the movie Primer, and how I don’t understand the movie, even after watching it twice, but I think of how you and I are like the characters in that movie in that you like time travel and I like being with you for seventy-seven minutes.

Today, I wake up warm, Frito-covered, and about to be eaten, a pizza in a box. Maybe I’ve been reincarnated, thinking of the unopened Bhagavad Gita in my backpack, your sacrilegious Ganesha iPhone case, our incense burning as a fuck you to the lease agreement.

Maybe I’m back in time, the pizza you ordered in the future, that became the past that became the present. I don’t know when I am, but I want to be useful to you. I want this poem to be useful to you, so if you can’t eat me, I strongly recommend the Frito’s pizza from Papa John’s.

Even if now you can only order it from the present.