an essay where everyone looks at the sky, an essay about marriage

by | Oct 15, 2019 | Issue Eleven, Poetry

an essay where everyone looks at the sky

the sky, a broken robin, clipped from the neck down.

beneath the robin, a diagram on how to conjugate

the sky. I am regurgitating my youth & now

the sidewalk is messy. I never not loved

the way you look in the sun, in the milk

of the moon, in the 60-watt lightbulb

in the lamp in the living room,

so I write a letter to death to say, please

don’t say hi, manners are for the birds

& if you come, come for me first.

see, my mother is still alive, thank god.

my father, too. & it wasn’t the cancer

that took my grandmother,

but the absence

of my grandfather that did. 

an essay about marriage

my dreams are decades apart, but in each of them a moment: a crimson sky rises then falls, the terror of a country lost as it just, in a blip, falls off a map. & so I go to the moon because I can, & I stay on the moon because I can. & I’m on the moon, which is cool & all, but it’s like shit do I miss you. I miss your nose & the eskimos who taught me how to kiss it. I miss the songs I never sang to you, & your feet swollen & sore as you carried me from one feeling to the other.

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