You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.

yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight

when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?

Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.

a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning

a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.

                                                                                                                                       i am building him a morgue
                                                                                                                                                       for Thanksgiving.

It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.

We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.

The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.