When, for the fourth week in a row,
I wake up with your name
frozen on the corners of my lips,
it is the heaviest burden to think
I could swallow it
& call that eating
a piece of myself for breakfast—just one lick
away & the mere cost of losing my vision
for you to become silhouette, faceless.
The sky is blurry, rose, swollen,
bigger than big, always,
but I spilled a handful of snow today
on the piece of you
I keep on my desk.
I didn’t think something so small could break
anything until I noticed the cardboard spine
I had crushed
(in my haste, paper towels. Then, later, tissues.)
Paper never stands the same once it’s bogged with water-
color memory. How’s this?
When I look at you, I do not see a person.
I see the moon,
I see a house,
I see trees & the ghost of a future.
Future goes like this: Girl sees a man.
She can see through the man.
She does not know if he can see her back.
She is not looking at a man,
not a real one, anyway.
(People have always told me
my eyes make me look a bit sad.)
Like a season that comes every year,
looks like a new friend at first,
talks like it knows until it hits you:
this feeling, this it-hurts-to-breathe,
this going-outside-could-kill-you.
It’s tiring to be at fault, I say.
You would think we’d know
how to be invincible by now.
Instead, it’s the fourth week in a row,
& the corners of my lips are frozen
with a name they force themselves to speak
& silence.
It’s a name that mistakes paper for wood,
thinks thin sheets tough & smooth
& able to survive the wind.
It’s a name who thinks I’m as sturdy
as a living thing,
not so easily overpowered by a splash of water
or a handful of snow.
It’s a name, & by that I mean
it doesn’t understand winter,
& I’m tired of waking up
hungry.
The truth is
wood swells & bloats with ocean, too:
people make entire boats by splitting trees open.
& so, maybe Girl is wood after all, but
she still has to wake up & eat something,
doesn’t she? What do we do then?
Look to the sky for wisdom:
we do what we’ve always tried to do
but never quite got the hang of.
We get busy.
We move on.
We forget.
We try, at least.
Water stains & all.