Mark Yourself Safe

February is a bomb with no shelter. A basement strewn with self-portraits we assembled from pickaxes we thought might help us find the next handhold, from oaths and affirmations, from the toy pink plastic hairdryer left so long in the yard // so long / so long // it becomes a flamingo, becomes slippery, becomes the lining of lungs, breathes pollen and snow, takes flight with herons and kites, leaves the orange sled to its winter-melt, to mud so thick we must pray for the thinness of rain.

March is fewer fragments more fracture. More aftermath. Not calculus, which nobody likes, but maybe sudden proofs: if this, then. Suppose that P is true, deduce that Q is true, deduce that you need the offer of an arm, a late-night text, a maudlin building where music is made. The chords, the after-chords. It’s so late, we say. We are tired of flags at half-mast. Please, we say, find a way to unsleep.

April is bands of tornados landing in somebody’s palm. Then the floods—crabapple blossoms, pink dogwood branches flung like smoke tendrils from backyard fires. Our small cells call to each other // stranger / stranger // this is the time of fasting and feasting. A flicker stalks the yard, pecking on upturned earth. A finch’s nest is destroyed in the storm—these are the lyrics we hear in the dark. We’re cracking plates with small hammers, setting the shards in cement. The mortar dries. Here is the pattern we’ve drawn on our arms. The ink sets. We pierce our lungs with eleven holy places of song.

Hundred Meter

We are aching and wired and wrapping our ankles twisted to one side and swollen by grief. We’d like to sprint—a twilight race against our great-aunt at ten, a kid who could outrun boys on bikes, we’re told, could outrun the ones who held her shoulder a touch too long, could run all night if there was someone else she needed to be.           By the time we find her, tilted to one side and sprained by grief, our great-aunt at ten (times 9.58) is nobody you’d choose to know, let alone challenge to a race near dark, but we wheel her through the woods’ end-of-wick light, into cicadas and dust.        My ankle got caught in the high jump once, she says, and, in case you’re wondering, we nod and wheel her past the willow oaks and serviceberries and grim, grasping ivy; we wheel her to the field at the edge of the high school track            (our grief now is thick and humid—it hangs over the dark lanes and muffles tipped hurdles and sodium lights, it shushes the tree frogs—and every last one of us limps, tripped up by the weather of that grief)             and if we’ve told you one time too many, just still your breath, be still and know that—at the moment of her passing—she unspools from the chair like an elastic bandage in the hands of an amateur god and we all take lanes, we crouch for the start, we swab our great-aunt’s lips with a damp, peony-pink sponge, hold her hands and sing like a passing bike bell,                    Go!