we sang the aspens to sleep

the streetlight overhead flickers out on me
in the middle of a conversation with my shadow.
i was just telling her i'm having trouble believing
that i won't be the one left behind. i think bad news
only finds me on beautiful days; the black dog is waiting
just a few turns away, but i've always been someone
who stares down the horizon. it's that or the rearview,
because if i look to my side i'm not sure i'll find you there,
pointing out all the ways the world is changing without me
from the passenger seat. i should've listened to the leaves
while they were still here. should’ve died a hundred times
on the road to chicago but didn’t. should’ve told the dog
not to beg for what it's been promised: i’ll be ready soon.

i've got a memory of you, standing on the surface
of a lake when it's one degree above freezing. you,
ready for the risk of breaking and sinking if it means
everything that is numb makes sense for a moment.
you, claiming you walked yourself there. you,
scared it’ll crack and just as scared it won’t.

i wonder what would’ve happened if i’d dared
to join you instead of gripping the wheel, watching
from a window rolled up. would you even understand
if i said the thought makes me cold? i’d be screaming
through winter, trapping my fogged breath in a parked car
and waiting for the frost to find me. i'm always saying
there's enough dead kids where we're from. still,
there was something beautiful about you on the ice:
the only warm thing in sight, for one suspended second,
spun around like an angel chasing its wings.

somewhere, the songbirds are alive and well.
good for them; i'm stretching, trying to drag myself
out of the dream where you call me by the wrong name.

on the screen, people are coming up with new places
to put bullets. i don't know her, even though i've seen her
in every girl my age; now i think most of my own problems
must be small enough to fit between my teeth if i grit them.
some days when you're away, i fold up the radio waves
into my ribcage to collect dust like those linens
in the closet of a house we don't set foot in anymore.
i don't want them to open me up and find nothing
but silence. i'll still try to leave some eulogies for you.

remember how the most beautiful bird we ever found
was dead in the middle of the road without a car in sight?
we couldn't take it with us— you hummed to it anyway
and i swear the rockies joined in too. it's odd to be jealous
of something that's gone. you say you'd move mountains for me:
i just want to be missed like these peaks would mourn their snow.

tell me again about the day you woke up
and scratched a prayer into the gap
where the blinds didn't quite meet
the windowsill: if i cannot fit into
my mother's arms anymore, at least
let me be a river running. tell me how
the keys bit your palm on your way out,
how the hinges sighed behind your back
but didn't ask for you to reconsider. tell me
we could both do that, right now, be runaways
at an age no one's going to send a search for.
tell me you're okay with being forgotten.
tell me you'll make sure i never will be.

everyone's got their own ideas of what's out there:
a howling woman in white, the man still covered
in coal dust, the thing you spot in the valley
and desperately hope is just a wolf. i know it's real
because it's been at my window, promising me
i'll be outgrown long before next summer—

and well, summer this year held strong
before surrendering all at once, just like
the crawling ivy that threatened the sides
of my childhood home and then withered up
in what my mother calls a miracle and what i deem
a peace too sweet to be true. those vines
were the greatest declaration of war issued
on its frameworks since i screamed at my father
so loud i swear the words are still pressed
into the floorboards, like dried flowers—

so i think perhaps some invasions, like arguments,
only change battlefields when they were thought
to have died out. maybe it's taking root again here,
crawling up the walls, but i can't bring myself
to pull the curtains shut. you and i both want
to watch the end of the world from a house
where the lights are always on, where the distinction
between the sun swallowing us and the pale warmth
we contain is a semantic difference at best—

especially since it feels like it's going to go down
like that any day now. you look my way and i want
to twist myself into knots when you ask me
what's whispering through the glass. i don't know
how to tell you love is a thing with too many teeth
making small talk with the skeleton in my closet
without also saying i was fooled into thinking
it was smiling at me before i saw the fangs.
it'd be easier to crawl home to my parents
and say i'm sorry you got something more creature
than daughter. maybe i could force the words out
if i tried addressing the foundation instead—

but then again, who knows what's rotting in there.