The Carrying

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.

I know you don’t always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can’t help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.

I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it’s just to say I cared enough.

Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks breaknecking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

I don’t know how to hold this truth, so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down in case, later, no one believes me.

More than the fuchsia fennels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I'll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full/ of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—/ to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward/ what’s larger within us, toward how we were born./ Look, we are not unspectacular things,/ we’ve come this far, survived this much. What/ would happen if we decided to survive more?

Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow/ down to the madness that makes me.

A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.

What if, instead of carrying/ a child, I am supposed to carrying grief? / The great black scavenger flies parallel now, each of us speeding,/ intently and driven, toward what we’ve been taught to do with death.

the one who wants to love you, but often isn't good at even that, the one who doesn't want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

I trust him. He leans in, tells me the real miracle, more than marriage, the thing that makes you believe there might be a god after all, is the making of a child. He stares at me, but I am not there anymore. I don’t say we’ve tried a long time, been sad, been happy, that perhaps the only thing I can make is love and art. I want to tell him that’s enough. Isn’t it?

What I know now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each morning and recognise my own flesh, for this one thing she made—me—to remain how she intended, for one of us to make it out unscathed

crossed-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today’s news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncapping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

DANDELION INSOMNIA The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun drunk and heavy with thick knitted leg warmers of pollen. I was up all night again so today’s yellow hours seem strange and hallucinogenic. The neighborhood is lousy with mowers, crazy dogs, and people mending what winter ruined. What I can’t get over is something simple, easy: How could a dandelion seed head seemingly grow overnight? A neighbor mows the lawn and bam, the next morning, there’s a hundred dandelion seed heads straight as arrows and proud as cats high above any green blade of manicured grass. It must bug some folks, a flower so tricky it can reproduce asexually, making perfect identical selves, bam, another me, bam, another me. I can’t help it—I root for that persecuted rosette so hyper in its own making it seems to devour the land. Even its name, translated from the French dent de lion, means lion’s tooth. It’s vicious, made for a time that requires tenacity, a way of remaking the toughest self while everyone else is asleep.

WONDER WOMAN Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well, sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy, said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank, brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age, dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman. She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible, eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have), she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth— a woman, by a river, indestructible.

Their power is in not moving, so we must move to them.

(What if no one comes to the cliff side where my skin’s ashes set sail? No mourning kin, no lost hitchhiker.) But friends, it’s lunchtime, and doesn’t my mouth still work; my appetite, my forked tongue.

The great black scavenger flies parallel now, each of us speeding, intently and driven, toward what we've been taught to do with death.

HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO First, it’s a fawn dog, and then it’s a baby. I’m helping him to swim in a thermal pool, the water is black as coffee, the cement edges are steep so to sink would be easy and final. I ask the dog (that is also the child), Is it okay that I want you to be my best friend? And the child nods. (And the dog nods.) Sometimes, he drowns. Sometimes, we drown together.

put on the white dress that you had once said made you look like an angel with its real swan feathers and fools gold. Then I sat for a long time in the night and waited. At dawn, I woke with feathers sticky on my tongue and I remembered you were dead all over again.