In this space where I try to realize my sins were only survival, here, where the walls don’t breathe with the spirit of the people of the land who were wronged — it was a house on a site of forced surrender, the walls sighed with it — I can’t forgive the fire that burned it down I can’t forget how the earth trembled when I shook my fist, making it fall, and how after the quaking ceased, the waters rose to wash me away with my home And while over and over again I go back to die on…

Riding in the car through the country
on the way back
from picking up the
prescribed, the scent of burning
leaves and brush reaches
me through rolled down windows,
and I think of him and me
camping, the red rockface
at our backs, rust backbone rising
up behind us, our fronts
facing the fire, back
when my body could bend

That was before hanging on for dear life, when my arms still hung swinging from loose shoulders down from ears tuned to coyote howls, eyes rolled smoothly in their sockets to spot hawks in the sky from inside a skull…

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…

When 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 fall Maybe because I…

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…