twenty-two

Because in the dim parking lot
one man’s sobriety was a flower for his truths;
because Max’s hair in the rain.

Five days this month I hulled a ship;
whittled down the masts to
birth marrow for grief to reside
in peace. And Joseph, old
enough to be my father,
who believed my pain was truth,
once emailed me a lonely

“Let me know if you need anything—anything at all. Anything.”

After I’d begun taking too many xannies
to wrestle violence into arpeggios
which meant the only thing
I had to barter was my hand, to my head,
to the edge of the bed, to three
breaths an hour into the sky.

Yet somehow I felt hunted as the
pills corralled the world
indefinite and shapeless;
perhaps this was the eerie kind of freedom
the showbird chained to the dock,
without knowing of its wings,
mimics into happiness.

So I ate a truth so large it led me blind;
that in order to sustain hunger as a precision,
my humanity should keep not in the soft of
my palms but in cyclical, dying singularities:

an unhung landline. The horizon after
the waves swallow the morning.
The last third of a revolving door.
Winter burying the damp maple leaves.

Still, in solitude, I needed a prayer
answered, so I trusted that slicing
its sea open would promise the body it’d bloat to
shore—clean;
but to think I tried so
hard to disappear only to find
forever
between the feeder channels.
And still

I unfurl,
and unfurl,
and unfurl;

and
dear Mother, help me—

I still don’t know why my eyes are so endless.