LMS VII: like foxes through fences

losing my daughter, at this point,
means:

deer by the river
like you’ve never seen.
a soup bowl, empty, aglow.
another’s head in my hands,
hair spilling out and into
any orifice.
receiving the word
a day late, downtown.
a love of statues,
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
somewhere in Boston.
a love of placards.
art, not reflective of,
or art as a sideshow.
knowing the names of the kids of others.
knowing just how many gifts God had.
weight gain, weight loss,
detecting no difference
in weight.
buying a telescope
in your twenties,
just to buy a telescope.

05.22.2026 - center of gravity

the body remembers, though
it has been four years since the summer
you shattered your knee but still limped out across
the continent to California to see me.
this is the fourth summer you’ve placed between
yourself and the last pin, but your body remembers
the torturous lengthening of fused
and toughened tissues.
the scar with its ten numb inches
of track has come to fade bone-white against your skin,
but it’s still stored somewhere in your sockets or cells.
you’re going to take yourself beyond
this firmament, you know.
when you’re confronted with
the darkened garden at the Plymouth Plantation
blooming up before you can stop it, you’re there again,
trespassing after me through shadowy pines
and night-damp Atlantic air,
like a seizure or a vision.

06.15.2026 -

the girl I am sitting cross-legged in front of
shares the same bruises as me, and we create new ones
on each other, swelling like sweet gumdrops
or ripe fruit.

her hands mold me into a mulberry;
I bleed sugar and water and sap.
we created puncture wounds into each other,
sucked the salt out then bandaged each other up
and smiled at the togetherness of it all,
opening ourselves up so that the other
can love our insides too. hers
is the burn of incense with silk, she knows.

I am laying down now,
polite as cousins, while the pear blossoms
loosen one by one into the yard.
we know that we wear our skin down until
it is so thin that we can't help but feel
all of one another.

06.15.2026 -

all these years of living outside the city
have turned my heart rural (what I mean is:
I am outside of myself); the only things that
I can acknowledge exist separate from
who I am and what I feel.

cicadas rub their arteries together,
too small not to touch when laying so close.
their wings are collapsing inward like baby photos,
little sisters sitting with their knees pulled up.
I remember far too much of it.

you tell me not to look so sad
and then look sadder than me.

06.21.2026 - father's day

I have been in a sort of purgatory since I left Swansea
after our memorial for my father.

when Eddie and I stop at a gas station,
we enter the bathroom, look into the full-length
mirror. even with him standing up, I can count
all 24 of his ribs, all of them poked out and looking
like gallows.

the way he looks reminds me of my father.
right before my father died,
his face looked like cruel weather.

there are these pictures of my father holding me up
to a willow tree each time I cried.
nobody else could hold me up the way
he could. I have dreams of his face covered in scrapes
that were deep with small soldiers and miniature colonial women;
everything seemed bloody then.

right after my father died,
I listened to “Wild Horses” on repeat. in my dreams,
father has no hands with which to shoot.

06.22.2026 - you forgot it in people

I gave you two paperback novels,
and you forgot to read both of them;
they sat on your nightstand for three months like father's urn.
the cover of one is neon yellow, all bright like the insides
of your mouth, and the cover of the other
is greens and whites with the face of a small bird
coming out from the center.

I knew you wouldn’t like either book,
but I loved them, so I gave them to you anyway,
then watched them pool together in dust the way sweat pooled
across my body, my body underneath yours, yours a small
lightning rod and mine ever-expanding, corkscrewing
out like a mountain range or like a bottle of wine.

the first day we met, we ended up in your car,
and I sat in the passenger seat and was terrified of your hand,
but still mine crept to it like a fish to sand sprinkled across a beach
by a child. I tell you that your kiss is mother-of-pearl,
brown horn, plastic blue as a vein beneath the tongue.
the greenness of our unemployed summer days
was halted by Arsenault's phone call,
those deep azure ripples in the Mohawk River
tinged with tiny blood vessels and your moonlight.

in St. Louis, you circle a bit of clairet Earth.
you tell me that you still write about the day we broke fast;
you used to be so afraid to write about me.

06.24.2026 - an exercise in self portraiture

August of 2008, we sat tucked away
like old wolves’ fur into a blue station wagon.
I refused to talk to anybody but my father.
I sat the way he did, our shoulders crooked
like the gardens of elderly women.
I talked the way he did, too, drawn out and low,
like swirling concrete. this is retribution,
what I get for being afraid of him.

October of 2014, my nose bled tiled floors.
I was shelled up in the bathtub, my body fled into ice,
or at least it felt that way.

January of 2026, I am folded into mountains
like the comforter of a child; it is winter, now,
and Jade's stomach expands.
I break an egg in my hands like a crack of thunder,
and I do not move from the kitchen, yet.

March of 2012, my father tells me this story
of the family of deer that once lined the lawn of the house
down the street from where we lived. they were without anybody
but walls white as the faces of daughters.
they lined the lawn for ten minutes, then were shot.
I wanted to walk through a body of woods;
I wanted the woods to be full of leaves.

March of 2026, this thing, loss,
belongs to us.

February of 2021, we had bodies that twisted away
without warning, bodies that forgot to root themselves down
anywhere, unless they were rooting their hands down onto skin.
when I first met you, I scraped my hand onto my pronounced clavicle;
my initial reaction was to bleed. I am trying to picture
our bodies together again, trampled by the rain.
where you used to live, it always rained.

June of 2026, it’s only been a week,
maybe, or a day, or three weeks, or two months
(here, time stretches and then is collapsed, is sometimes
flattened and thin and other times curls thickly like hair).
if I let my head fall into her shoulder, gently,
maybe then she will let her hands
rifle through my hair.

06.29.2026 -

someone from your past
has gone beneath the duvet cover,
and you can hear the wailing from here to Saginaw.
people begin to breathe blood; they’re choking up, soughing,
"take it easy!" I could never ask how you are.
you have been making noises in your sleep:
door knocking, shuddering your soft animal body,
tying your hair back with
the tired elastic from a bread bag.

these midwestern daughters love all living things.

(it's too easy for me to look into the mirror
when I’m brushing my teeth.)
you’re still sleeping in my hair, my
flesh is still crawling with your sweat.
I want details, sometimes I think I want your face but
then I remember you’re still climbing the stairs like a ghost. I
almost let you be my ghost.

07.01.2026 -

I’m into you like how my shoulders make waves.
there is a river tearing down from my neck;
I think that you are inside
of my head like a second burden.

no, but see, I have so many souls
all taped to my gutters, to my insides.
I think that’s why I’m always
holding doors open for strangers.

I tell you that my body doesn’t exist
except at night, in dreams and nightmares.
most of the time, I feel like a very poor animal
in your eyes: I don’t move the way I used to;
not as much and not as quickly.

07.09.2026 - Burlington, Vermont

I never glow, although sometimes, I shiver.
Vermont: I used to say I saw Lake Champlain in your eyes,
your nose as a trout, or salmon. your breath washed
against me like the sea into a pier.

we wore black like ominous birds shrouded,
our eyes a profligate deluge,
the cemetery where your mother was buried
inundated with pink brio and the tawdry yellows
of inexpedient sunshine.

somewhere, you had kissed me, never caring
to remove a cigarette from your mouth.
today, I stretch like smoke over the windowsill
and bless the sky for that.

I hope you're still swimming,
with shoulders as fins, hands probing
the lakebed, softly, searching for fossils.