*

Lawnmowers clip your words like blades of grass. What did you say? I yell over the noise. Purple irises bloom inside your mouth. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus: each word a wet petal falling from your tongue.

*

I read you every poem I’ve written since you left. You smoke—death hasn’t cured your addiction. We lie in the cut grass, but now you can see through the sky. Tell me something interesting about clouds, I say. You think it over, and then: Do you regret letting your phone go to voicemail?

*

Your voice sounds different, like a recording of your voice. I read you my poems about grief. You say grief is not about what’s lost, but what’s left behind.

*

The irises in your mouth are rust-colored. I store your cigarette smoke in glass jars.

*

The rain may never end. And why would it want to? Why would it choose to fall to its death?

Grief reinvents itself. Like rain.

*

Today, the sky is cloudless and I am filled with dread.

Pareidolia: seeing familiar images in random things. Like animals in clouds.

You blow a smoke ring. It looks more like your face than your real face.

*

I try to lift your suitcase but it’s too heavy. I open it and a single cloud escapes. Clouds are surprisingly heavy, you say.

*

bleeding heart  *  red-winged blackbird  *  hyacinth  *  fistfuls of onion grass  *  rhododendron  *  pistachio ice cream  *  sturgeon moon  *  nimbostratus  *  cirrocumulus  *  New and Collected Works  *  tiger swallowtail  *  sleepy orange  *  hibiscus tea  *  Japanese maple  *  cumulonimbus  *  sky as metaphor  *  goodbye in eight languages  *  ocean as metaphor  *  death as metaphor  *  goodbye as cloudless sky  *  goodbye as white noise  *  goodbye as sugar cube  *  goodbye as goodbye  *  goodbye

*

What will I do with myself, now that grief is no longer the heaviest thing I’ve held?

Anxiety’s gloved hands were already on my throat

by the time I was 16, so when mechanical issues forced the

cart to a halt on the second floor of the haunted mansion ride, the

darkness didn’t faze me. Nor did the dangling skeletons, vampires

emerging from coffins, or the disembodied hand crawling across the

floor—what scared me was the mirror on the wall opposite me. It was

gilded, slightly crooked, and housed my reflection: young, uncertain of what

hung just around the figurative and literal corner. Someone

in the cart behind me—whom I couldn’t see—started screaming:

Just get me out of here! My reflection in the mirror laughed: who are you

kidding? You’re never getting out. Even then, I knew it was a metaphor. As the

lights flickered on, I considered how comfortable I felt, how I might be

more afraid of leaving than staying. That would become a theme—the

novelty of fear stroking my hair with its long claws. The strobe lights were my

obsessions, my heartbeats; the audio of sinister laughter and screaming  

people was my life’s soundtrack. I thought: that coffin would make a fine bed. A

quixotic plan, I now realize, but at the time I was possessed with a

rare combination of adolescent idealism and dread that made the idea

seem rational. The ride restarted and the cart made its way outside, where

the ride attendant informed us where to go for a refund. Next time,

use your voice, I imagined him whispering to me. I will, my imaginary self

vowed—it’s not that I was afraid to scream. I was afraid no one

would hear me if I did. The attendant smiled, reassuringly, revealing

xanthic teeth that reminded me of a row of gravestones that have

yellowed with age. This was long before the era of hopping on

Zoom to tell my therapist: I’m lost again, it’s dark, I can’t find my way through.

I keep forgetting to close the doors of my poems.

You keep sneaking in.

There’s always a radio playing. Sometimes you’re bopping your head to static.

The way you sing my name so sweetly, now.

Like you’ve drilled holes through the letters to extract their sap.

You hand me a flashlight. We search for the lost fragments of Sappho’s lyrics but find only single words on scraps of papyrus: desire, fire, immortal.

You tell me this is how you died: by eating words that weren’t for you.

Black ink staining your lips.

When I return from the underworld each night, I know things I didn’t know before.

About the anatomy of a bell—crown, mouth, lip, shoulder, waist.

About the anatomy of a book—head, spine, joints.

About the anatomy of love—crushed mint, forsythia.

I ask what you do when you can’t sleep. You say:

Sometimes, late at night, I let the radio listen to me.

_________________________________________

Note: This poem is from a series in which I am using my own found poems as the endings of new poems. The final line, “Sometimes, late at night, I let the radio listen to me” is a found poem I wrote using the 2009 Dial Press Edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (page 9).