I have never bitten into anything

18.

If you turn around now &
tell me that you want to be sky,
then I will let you,
as long as you promise to bleed
the next eighty thousand sunrises;

I will stop mentioning you
to forests & start looking for you
in satellites & in smoldering coals,
if you promise to murmur my name
when the horizon is stretching
& prostrating itself
across the late evening.

I will tell you where the sun
goes when the Atlantic swallows
her whole, if you tell me
about the streams of cirrus clouds
backing up your bloodstream
& clogging your arteries.

I never ask you to search for
the wildfires under my shirt again,
if you give me all of the starlight
under yours.

19.

There are cities
in the palms of my hands, teeming
with life like the Great Barrier Reef.
I want you to stop sighing
& slumping in your chair.

I want you to smile
like an innocent child, for once.

20.

[CW: Miscarriage]

When I first feel it in my stomach,
we are at mass, & I am in my linen dress,
pearl white like the color of four walls in a hospital room
or the color of his teeth when he is smiling,
like the sclera of my sister's eyes
when I told her we were going to have a baby girl
[& we had picked out your name, too],

& I realize that there is blood running
down my legs. God knows we can never have anything white
for too long without scuffing it up.

If there is room to build
even the smallest shelter in the spaces that you left in me,
I promise to construct one out of gentle words;
if there was a scripture to make the veins that
could've been under your skin sing praises a little louder,
then I would write & rewrite until my hands cramped
into paper mache.

21.

I'm going to love you like your bedroom walls never could;
lay your forehead against me like the shower wall

& try to recount every poem you've written.
You know too well: how your name sounds
when your hand is on my knee,
how your name sounds when
you are coaxing the life out of me,

as though my trachea
was the back door of your first apartment.

22.

You would have held
onto me until you’ve grown in size,
once you began to learn
meals on the granite, your feet
stretching on the maplewood floors,
the smell of cinnamon

to unravel building blocks
& lullabies. Yes, I would still
be married to the man I love
& we would blow bubbles
against the railings of our balcony.
The messages filled with humility,

& how to be fair with the weather,
& to give all your love to the woman
who fills your heart to the brim
in a small, distant room with
her childhood books that she had
managed to scrape together loosely.

There is lavender shining off
the bounce, circular & traveling
away from me. I am lonely
with these little notes I wish
to send to you, wherever
you really are. No, not

even the deepest ocean
could writhe in me now, only
the distance of water that is already
in my morning tears. Your memory
never leaves my bedside, of the day
when I put you in a boat & sailed you off.