I
At night,
this might be a beautiful place—
an orphanage of little suns pressed
against rain-slicked windows,
light bleeding like honey, soft and slow
on the glass.
A boy jumped from one of them last week.
We were peeling back the foil on your mother’s pupusas,
massa breaking like moondust in my mouth,
wet and clinging on the palate;
like your love, something innocent
to choke through.
II.
That thing you never told me—
I have only the shape of it,
the footprint of your fixations,
the weight of your red-eyed wilderness,
the whole of your helplessness
on mine.
But who am I to judge you, to judge him;
aren’t we all just weeds,
waiting on some lover to make a bouquet of us?
What tremble did I twist you from,
what terrible hush devoured you when I let go?
III.
You lose yourself here
where bodies outnumber names.
Maybe a painter could find order
in the sums of flesh,
but he was just a boy
seized by our sickness.
I never know who is owed the apology here,
who should grieve,
who should get down on their knees and beg.
IV.
That boy.
You didn’t follow him but something fell.
The only proof I hold is my own departure—
The scent of your vomit on stone.
The strike of your finger at my breastbone,
pounding, praying.
I prayed the proof of my crime would die
in your disappearance,
in the girl I shed for these womanly bones.
But the truth is, a tree falls
no matter the witness.
Sensibility ducks out from under it.
Cruelty pretends not to hear the crash.
V.
Blur your eyes, and the glass becomes stars.
This candle we lit for a cruel love,
only our bodies know
what monsters their shadows cast.
We knew it then, and we know it now:
not all light leads to greater light.
Sometimes there is shadow.
Sometimes there is shade.
Sometimes there is just a warm August breeze
soothing a grieving mother to sleep.