It’s January and I am teaching my son how to give up. He watches the gnarl of the hospital bed
for my breath, the paper bib a misplaced wing, heaven rising and not rising from my ribs.
*
I believed so many things about myself. about dragging men into graveyards to kiss them. about dreamsicle martinis mucousing the counter. I thought love had outlines everyone could see. that we all made snow angel impressions. that everyone was seven and staying in the body-dug depression as long as could be.
*
sometimes when I give up it has a different color than surrender. there is nothing to magenta or throb, just end.
then sometimes I’m inhaling a swing set covered in snow.
*
now, I make pink-aisled love to your absence and call it home.
*
last month, I named every light which washed his face. I traced nudge of ocean melt, Airbnb monoglow, overhead Subaru cop-kind fluorescent marrow. I wanted the shades drawn over me.
*
I tell my son that people in New York are more alive. They have to be.
My son knows this lesson the way butterflies know winter.
*
He has asked me to kill him. He has asked me to listen. He has watched convulsion migrate the length of my face.
*.
God hears us. Electric chill across a saw.
God puts his mouth to our vibration and purrs.
*
Fuck all thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
Where do you think a mother hurts?