1

You are lying in bed with

your fingers over your heart

(like you are dead but blinking

in and out like

the fireflies outside the window)

and you are listening to your mother calling.

She says I can hear what you are doing up

there. You are imagining his fingers holding

onto the string that has tangled in the water where 

all of you comes together.

You are silent.

 

In memoriam: on the surface of the water 

that is being imagined they look like

christmas ornaments.

You are four and you are hanging them on the tree

until you drop one and it shatters on the floor

like they are shattering now 

in the reflection.

 

2

The other day, two friends took a picnic basket

full of wine and crumpled rubber to the edge

of a field just before the trees started their upwards pantomime

and nestled there. They had forgotten a blanket. 

They lay on the bare ground and pretended that the prickling blades

of grass were the encouragements of Roman soldiers.

They wrestled naked. 

 

In memoriam: lying on the hill, watching them float by

he finds red stippling his thighs and wonders if they are

the wounds left by swords. 

 

3

When Milos closes his eyes he sees the red swallow of the sun--

a circle of blood where he pressed his thumb onto the side of the coffee cup.

He feels guilty, afterwards, because when the waitress picks it up her finger

wanders along the gulped syllable of him and the look on her face

was his mother's after he was born. 

 

In memoriam: There is bread rising in the oven.

You are sitting by the window with the thick spanish heat

baking in your lungs and a cup of tea leaves in your hands. 

You can hear crying from outside. It is because 

they have swallowed all the helium. 

Their voices are tinny but they cannot fly. 

 

4

Under the ripples in the air, cars koi fish by and

BEAT THE SUMMER HEAT. Sarah reads in whisper off 

the billboard. There is a heat condensing in her chest

and there are fingerprint burns on her like wounds of kisses where 

she forgot to say no again (I tell her to keep trying

and she tells me that she has already given up). In her half-sleep, 

she dreams that she is a mountain. Lava curls around her toes.

The top of her cannot breathe in the thin sky. 

She wakes up with her mouth open, does not exhale

until she can feel the red line where the string has cut into her

fingers. When it is not there, she deflates with a little milk-breath sigh. 

 

In memoriam: when a fire is put in a closed space

it shrivels up and dies. We all need air to survive.

 

5

Roth writes about sex and food but you have stopped

partaking in both. You wrap your empty stomach

around you, empty turtle in ribbed shell, fever dreams of

Watermelon Sugar as gray days in your huddled skull. 

Touching is blasphemy.

You are holy in your basket above the world. 

Your skin swells away from the fire inside you. 

 

In memoriam: hot air balloons. Hi ho. 

 

6

I am transcribing this in the belly of 

a balloon and I don't know when I'll be back again

because I can no longer read the Cambria (Body)

hairs on your back into which I breathed your story.

 

In memoriam: this is my love letter to you and the sky.