let me mourn my miscarried childhood my father’s lobotomy let me wrap this [ ] where some thing should be in a swaddling blanket let me read it stories tell it goodnight let me sleep in an ocean of black lace let me pile it high an altar to the god of empty space let me pray let me pray some ode to the thing i do not know i am missing some mother that was not mine some button locked in the floorboards of my apartment let me thank it for it's persistence in being somewhere that is not here let me be not here let me sing a hymn over the subway rumbling on some journey that is not mine let me bless that motion carrying forward anyone who wishes to go forward but let me be still // once i filled the hole of my stomach with uncountable candy coated tylenol talked my friend out of oxy with my sweet smile wondered if we would die anyway // i wanted to write about the rain how on this particular piece of earth it is always the same water bouncing off the asphalt into the sky and back again // would it change anything if i told you their father had died that the house still smelled like him that we are always trying to take care of ourselves but are prone to taking the wrong medicines // in an attempt at immortality an almost benevolent god buried shards of hope inside each raindrop our rainbows — the result of this slicing open of the sky // i stayed alive that month my room wasn't my room but storage for my father's lost apartment his third death that year my floor an archive of comics his hospital room overflowed with characters does it matter that they were all in his head that they put him there in the first place a home is just a claim does it matter that i read every smoke-dusted page found no heroes to save him // most nights i curl up in bed with ghosts give them all i have which is another way to say desire // in an act of rebellion i pray for chaos instead of peace wake up in an april shower with no umbrella spend the night wringing it out of my hair place what i can in thumb-sized vials mop the rest off the floor // if silence is the sound of a sentence being reborn if dawn is waiting to rupture with new language // how can i say dying without living

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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