The neighborhood boys have grown taller
than their absent fathers.
My girl use to be one of the boys,
throat a gun tossed in to a river
fist fight for a mouth
bag of ice for a father.
Then her body grew soft where she did not want it soft
grew full, grew heavy,…
The winter was so cold that you could peel whole islands out of the sea.
Even the animals started skinning each other’s hides for warmth.
The aftertaste of a Goodbye is the worst to get rid of. It’s a warm
brown sugar that melts softly into brine.
There is no finality in words, no period at the end of every sentence.
We are ellipses, caesuras, the pauses between blinks.
And the breath, a storyteller once told me, is the most important part.
What end does a goodbye offer when even our echoes can cause
avalanches?
There is a well in our hearts, and every night the water
freezes over until I can no longer think of anything but lost language, lodged
in the iceberg of my mouth.
Everything is still here. The letters I wrote are still stuck between my
teeth. My old home still has my name scratched on the underside of a windowsill.
Everything is still here. Even seasons just change from solid to liquid to gas.
And still, your mouth on my mouth is a thought as
fresh as melting icicles away with my
breath.
