sunday scaries

this house is full of pronouns no longer my own

and carolyn called again this thursday

said we’ve lost nine of us in seven years

and i am reminded of the psychiatrist

who once told me that to love myself

it must be tender and violent

so that i become wallpaper or a doorway

i sleep in a bed not five feet from where

junior met god or met blackness or met tomorrow

but i lost my health insurance and have become the 26th

blimp in america or the borealis, depending on the measure

of your gaze or the poison of your tongue or

the rigidity of your diagnosis or the proxy of your splendor

which is all code for i have moved back in with my parents

someplace on the clipboard, they saved room for mercy

and i am in love with the woman in me that is shaped

like a handkerchief and silent as a clothesline who kissed

laughter into the fruited rind of my wounding injection site

in a december-white cold 11 suns ago

this house is full of pronouns no longer my own

and carolyn called again this thursday

said we’ve lost nine of us in seven years

but what do we make of poor matthew

the girl-fuckup needled into a boy-wonder

sharpened like an origami crane

perhaps the shape i leave in the earth

will be a less pronouncable spectacle

but i have plagiarized every glow in my body

and in a stolen sky, the clouds look like faces,

the years blew by and of course our cells still remember

because this house is full of pronouns no longer my own

and carolyn called again this thursday

said we’ve lost nine of us in seven years

death is a musical and i sing my siren song for thee

capital

john singing tell me why i have to miss you

into my headphones, i am stuck in a lyft

at the intersection we used to say i love you at.

a new emblem of my loss: a rejection letter

for the first poem i wrote about you,

sent to my email two years after you left.

there’s a heatwave buttoning up the midwest,

so i yearn for the cold that ran up my back

as we took horses to the top of a hill

in north texas, looked at the empty before us

and said let us live long enough to see this twice.

now i am just trying to live until the turnpike

is no longer under construction.

i see your outline in bodies crossing the street,

hear you say i am okay in dreams

after i go to sleep worrying you’re not.

i stir awake to the sound of hooves clacking

mindlessly into the stone.

i am thinking about you always—the hot,

resplendent air that fills the earth when you laugh.

i am thinking about how i will never know

where you’ll be when you grow old.