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.

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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).