I’m terrible at communication with the undead, you-see. Not zombies but friends & relatives & neighbors. Instead of calling to say happy birthday or goodnight or I miss you so much it is eating at my liver and my boney white legs, I write poetry for a boy who likes computers in Australia or an apology to an ex-lover’s ex-girlfriend who likes Jane Austen and whiskey and I’ve never met.
You send me christmas cards with sweet cliches like photos of puppies in stockings, or write letters of his affliction with the LORD and I sketch a pumpkin and doodle the date in block letters until the urge to be intimate has passed. It is so fleeting— memories of your collar bones, your green socks pulled up over your ankles, the hair on his chest easily replaced with warm skin and the smell of cotton balls.
I think I like you more in my head. The way I’ve written you down cramps my fingers and then I remember how you live somewhere that turns cold while it’s still summer and I may say I do, but I have no plans to visit. I start my letters always the same: “I keep trying to be happy but my heart is too damn sad.”

What organizes the cycle of thoughts? One minute: whether the smell of seaweed is pleasant, a dog’s capacity to memorize faces

and the next a dead father who’s own father is from your fairytale life and never writes.

Warming your cheeks and rushing through your blood like a flash flood, without a hint of foreshadow, expanding and filling every crevice of your mind and heart, he’s there. Stitched from real and pretend memory.

You sent three pictures, one of your mother and one of your dog and one of your smile, faded and rosy in hopes it resembled his son’s.

Maybe the letter was lost in the mail. The postage too small for the weight of the contents. Your face. Your solid round face, flushed and grinning.

He could have died in a fire from the Montana drought and the mailbox burnt to the ground with his livestock and new wife of 25 years. Your face just ash like his, blown along the smoking plains.

Or when he saw your picture, for the first time in seventeen years, his heart was drunk with sadness. It all came rushing back, surrounding and filling every crevice.

It has been months. You think of the card with the mountain flowers in bloom that your mother gave you to write to him on. Don’t give up. He has always had a hard time with loving.

You write his name in your best handwriting and wait. Turning over greetings and apologies on your dry tongue. The flowers on the front bow caged and begrudging. Stolen of their wilderness, their mystery.

You wonder if he has felt the same since you read the database of political donations, searching for a name you’d never said out loud and an address to pin on your map.

Assuming he wanted a granddaughter because he had no son.

I’ve adopted a dog named Tucker. I am still writing, and thinking of applying to grad school. I could teach English in Haiti.

You sent three pictures in August and never received a letter back.

Promise to forget because he’s already dead and you have a dog and a mother and could teach English in Haiti. Promise not to check the mail anymore for his name in the return address.

You don’t need to lose anyone else, you say. You don’t need anyone else to lose.

Feeling unloved is very similar to heartburn. It creeps up your throat from someplace deep in your chest that you can’t seem to place your finger on and then it just sits there, waiting for too big of a swallow or for you to lie down in bed. Then it is all consuming, only to fade for a few moments and wake you up with stabbing pains and tears in your eyes at six minutes to two.

I wanted to write a poem for each day you are away, like anne sexton or maybe it was sylvia before she turned on the gas. The thing is - I can’t come up with anything to say other than mumblings that I miss you and would like you to come home. I read letters between lovers and am puzzled by how little they begged. I try to call you but I just find myself mouthing it over and over, I miss you, come home. It hasn’t been 3 days yet and I’m clawing at the sheets and counting arbitrary collections of things we haven’t said. It’s not fair to miss you this much. It’s not healthy. Some people do yoga or exercise, others shout or drink- remember when I’d take pills so I’d sleep? Now I take your chest against my cheeks, the smell of the detergent on your shirt. I need the texture of your voice and the consistency you hold in your hands. I have been holding my breath since you left and for 6 more days I won’t exhale.

In an interview, she said she doesn’t read while she’s writing

out of fear that the characters in her books will start sinking into her head—

their voices so loud that they leave residue on everything they touch.

Those things don’t matter. Not really.

When I read, or write, or eat or drive my car through rush hour traffic
in the frost that only lives a lifespan of winter morning air,

I want your residue, sticking to everything I touch.

I want to hear your voice over the others
between their swallows and coughs—

The hum when you’re thinking, your tongue clicking

Before you speak.

It’s as if your fingers can’t leave enough grease on my skin

Or bruises along my thighs, you don’t grip me hard enough—

Because we can still be torn apart- split at our seams.

And its too hard to pretend it’s not that hard to be so far

from the smell of sandal wood and cement.

I want the whole bottle, the great flood-

Soaking in you. Choking on your smell, your face, your taste.

I want you spilled out across the floor,

In my sheets, my hair, eyelashes, nailbeds.

To be consumed by your residue, by the scent of your skin

Melting against mine, the heat in my cheeks
awake in your cold numb hands.

I used to think you were beautiful. A mouthful of it. Sometimes, I’d sit and write of your face and its angles and the curves like mountains or salt valleys without streams. You were July and the heat was tempting, sucking my breath into the orange haze. I gave it freely. I lingered on the wall, watching, gingerly pulling my hair back and then untying it. I wanted you to think of the woman on the poster in the alley outside the bar. Effortless. Or how her arms looked. How she must have smelt when you pressed your lips against the back of her neck, where skin met hair. I would pretend the things you’d say were intended for me, repeating them after dark in the mirror, whispering to a faint outline of shadow and bone. I thought I had to be beautiful to have something beautiful. I had to eat pretty and talk pretty and stop showing all my teeth when I laughed. It was silly— living under piles of measuring tape and black nylon, mirrors cracked bent. But it felt safe —to always be counting. Always be making lists of things to improve. You see now I forget the shape I took when I woke, by the time I go to bed.

“Too stuffed” - had to check the bag I’d prepared all night
not to have to check.
He looks up at me from behind his thick glass,
clucking. “You have too much stuff”
holding onto the guttural sounds
so I am sure it is stuff, my stuff, that is too much.

Once he sits back in his seat, I’m praying again.
Praying we get there
Praying I remember to tighten the straps on my oxygen mask
before the flight goes down. Or no, it’s if—
if the flight should go down.

Praying I remember to take an ambien
before I fall asleep —
before we hit water, before we wake to it rushing past our ears,
pushing through our mouths and nose.
Before that hard slap in the face,
the one that says, “Here! Now! You’re alive!”

Why have they not instructed me on what to do
incase of a water landing.
Incase the man with a broken arm to my left
can not pull out his floatation device
& I hate swimming.
“Your stuff will sink.”

And how deep does it go? Would it take all night,
or would we sink to the bottom, touch our toes in the sand
in a year?

When is it too early to be a collectible?

I know we’re closer than they tell us on documentary tv.
Those deep sea dives that spit aqua then black,
dark, sea foam blue.

It’s closer than you’d think— lurking there creating shadows
in caverns of whale skeletons and ship decay.

And it lives in other places too. 

My mother’s locked drawer of her bedside table
with the photos I fingered as a little girl.
Photos of places my family never knew. Or on Sundays
in the last pew of mass.
The old woman with her eyes closed tight,
and her hands clenched tight,
holding her prayers for death so tight,
and only finding loneliness and sleep.

My stuff is too much. I’m not ready to tell you where it lives.
In my dreams it lingers between the curb in Carmel
and the bed that smelled of dawn. Always dawn.

Even at 5, it was the opaque alone that would wake me,
swallowing my spit, silence that tucked me in too tight.

And I won’t speak aloud of the blue black stuff,
the darkest, heaviest stuff, most sure to sink,
that sleeps with my father, propped on his pillow,
its feet tucked between the heat of his legs.

Not that stuff. The way it makes my mother cry
when I even hint of its dank looming weight,
clutching its prayers of death, in their marriage bed.

It is not my stuff to carry.

I woke up on the bottom corner of my bed,
next to my dog and chocolates from last July.
Fell asleep with your face behind my eyes,
your fingers on my knees, brushing my thighs.

And well, I’m terrified.
Happiness shouldn’t be so easy,
walks in the cold, cuddling in a French restaurant booth.
We didn’t do much, to get so much.

& I’m doing everything to keep you here.
To forget my losses, to hoard my gains,
I want to kiss you when the wrinkles wash your cheeks
and eyes. When our parents die.

When she begs us to help, in between tears,
her blonde hair knotted to her head.
When your heart breaks or you’ve grown tired of our warm bed.
It’s just, I can’t write the weight of it in words.
The heaviness of your head on my chest,
of your voice in my ears in the middle of the night,
praying for days without darkness,
days without rain. And I’m praying for poppies,
and lilies and you at the end of the day in black and white.

& I won’t say it, because marriage does not even seem to be the right word,
our souls have been married for years.
Tethered to one another, dragging lines through the Pacific
and collecting sand at the bottom of the Indian sea.
They rooted in one another the night you cried
your face in your hands, because you could see the broken parts
exposed from my ribs and jaw.
But fatherless and damaged, oh how we’ve grown.
Our father bigger than ever, our souls brand new and aglow.

It’s time I tell you everything. How the oaks we planted in the backyard never grew bigger than my forearm. How they are dead now and I don’t resent you one bit. I don’t read into anything anymore. I should tell you, the sky is more mapple than red when it’s almost time for me to have a drink. But I don’t, because we agreed on such things. Wine kills my heart. I think it only feeds it. But you disagree.

I should tell you, the world is much bigger than you said it would be. The smell of sand in between the sheets from our summer in Jersey, the red in my cheeks from the fourth of july we spent watching fireworks from your car — the feeling between my knees when you found the right place after a walk in the dunes, but it wasn’t our bed — it wasn’t our bed.

I should tell you, the sun is a different shade of pink since you’ve returned. I keep telling myself that maybe the sun is shy, but truthfully, I think it is something more. Maybe it has become accustomed to Autumn, like our souls, or maybe the equinox is late this year.

There are still things I’m not saying. You know that right? But until the sky makes its same face in the same haze of blood orange— that deep, deep red, that it had before you left, I just can’t trust that the bed will be made the way I like it in the morning, the pillows all in matching columns and rows. I can’t be sure that your aftershave will linger on the cold tiles of the bathroom, or your beard in my sink. While everything is so different, I can’t be sure you’ll be here when I wake.

There are so many things you just should have known,
the ink in the cupboard leaks when the windows fog up
and the candle beneath our bed burned a hole in the frame.
You should have known that they would spit in our yard
and cook meat on their lawns,
the smell of blood sliding under the cracks in the doors.
And I won’t explain why these things don’t matter—
why I still make you tea when the sun has not shown her face
in the morning sky.
I won’t explain, I will only say that they are constant
and part of life that awaits us in nashville,
paris or mumbai.
It will rain some days and the streets will flood,
the wind will skin the tiles from our roof.
Our baby will grow teeth and we will teach her to walk
in and out and in and out until one day she is out
and doesn’t want to come back in.
And there will be silence that sleeps in our bed.
And some nights it will be louder than others.
And I won’t get angry, although these are things you should have already known.
I’ll love you until there are no words left, or ways to spell it out in my hands.
And I won’t explain why, I’ll only tell you that it is.