breaths

A golden dusk;

The contrast between us and between our failures

Heartache takes place in the shallow bodies of water

strangling the softened eyes out of Zeballos 

(community of pop. 5000 and diminishing)

I can’t understand how you don’t see it

You established your worth then put it out 

in the weeds that grew up the side of my old townhouse

I watched the embers fall through the leaves

There wasn’t anything for you to realize

But I’m like this now and my sense of self

is all I have to give away

Beside the fig tree in that backyard 

I gathered the shards of a cheap hubcap 

into a pile and burned a small and slow 

transparent flame that filled the backyards

the open windows with plastic smell and smoke

You call it low grade anesthesia 

when I pull the white kitchen catchers over my head

I don’t know

I could already see your mother

through the kitchen window then

when it was dinner and dark set over the brutal oaks

Her fervent whispering of made up psalms

and ghost stories she’d learned from you

staring back at her window reflection

her hands white and bony around your neck

Each year when Christmas would come 

you were always ready to die

The hill up the road became spindled 

with stinging nettle and runaway dogs

I will never watch the city stir in its sleep 

from there with you again and for the better

Saturna just became an obsolete ideal

the way weed tea did, or Cipralex

This has never been easy for me to admit

but I don’t need you

You only want to spend my hard earned dollars

anyway ha ha ha

We’ve never actually watched a river run 

while standing together

and I can see now the cracks will form

in the wall whether I'm in the room or not. I lived 

for the smell of what we stole from department stores

That kind of thing's just too risky now