Subtracting hours from the days that you hold on your shoulders — wide like wings, your back carries the minutes through the clouds, and your arms hold the precious seconds up for me to see — I then count all the ways in which time expands in your presence to make the loss not seem so great The moments are ours to hold, and you grab them out of the sky as they fly then pass them to me But I can’t bear the gift in equal measure, too quickly do I let it slip through my fingers as I…

Oh mu God, I’m dyingWhen we were young — I sometimes make the mistake of thinking I haven’t aged while you have Maybe it’s because two years after you came into the world in the spring as a seed just cracked and so susceptible to the complete process of ruin, I was delivered as a perennial, hardy leaves and shoots grown back after winters of past incarnations Maybe because my father was a gardener can I recognize the entire cycle of seed to spent blooms on an annual only alive for one season, and it was our season before the…

I still walk down the path
through briars and brambles
towards an image of you
obscured by fallen limbs
and stems and shoots
that dissect your body
into shapes
I piece you together
with the clay I found
when I wouldn’t stop digging
I fill in the cracks
with all I ever knew
to be able to see
all I ever saw
To see you is to behold
the proof of what
sense’s observations make real:
something to move towards

A soft blur among the thorns, tangled twigs rattle as though someone’s brushed past, a tattered scrap of denim caught…

If I bowed to the earth,
kneeled down before her and lay
my head upon her chest,
ear to the ground,
could I hear the sound
of every heart in the world beating

Would the rhythm inside her ribs
be a cacophony of overlapping thumps —
an oration declaring, “We are alive.” —
or would the hammering of hearts be
the solitary hum of a single syllable,
not lonely and lost, but found

Could even a scintilla of a second of silence slip in between the thuds When one succumbs, would I miss the beat, or would another born instantly…

The very breath of him,
he
who breathes easy and slow
because he knows
the next will come
It will be given to him

But me, I am unsure,
and I would hold mine
just to watch and
hear him
be delivered from
one moment to the next

I know he would not
take
it so I grasp at
the faith he has
in the rise of his chest
after the preceding fall

An exhale then
I stare up
to the ceiling to
borrow
some time before
his next inhale

I pray for the sound then turn my eyes down…

From deep down and red
it rises
up and out,
dislodging butterflies from a cage
Free, they flutter
between ribs turned to powder—
the dust that coats their wings
Explosions in the chest
Confetti sticks to sweet heart

Salt sucked off of skin
with mouths
licking like laughter
rolling off of the tongue —
peals that ring like a bell
placed between swaying hips
on their way
to meet the perfect placement
of hands

Bottoms of feet
brushed with feathers
that up through the soles
reach the peach
pit of stomach
Grazing the peel
along the path
are soft fingers
that dip in the confection

From warm and wrapped
around each waist
it rises
up and out,
propelling hearts to beat
right out of the body —
a flight then a dive
deep down
to find another’s