His voice is on YouTube, but I still
can’t remember what it sounded like
the last time we spoke.
His mouth
fell off his skull in the rain.
I’m in a movie theater where another
towering man pretends to be him for 106 minutes.
My fingernails leave scars on the chair’s
un-empathetic arms.
I dreamt last night about rereading
his eulogy to a pack of hungry dogs.
I still haven’t dreamt about him.
It is September and we are all crying again,
drops of milk pouring out of our
refrigerator grief. My grandmother
dries her eyes and takes potatoes
out of the oven with her bare hands.
This is my brain’s sick joke—
sicker than I am. Sicker than he was.
Once, after, I held my breath
for as long as I could under the cremation
of bathwater. I touched all the blades
with the clumsiest of hands. I stuck
one leg off the rooftop and waited
to lose my balance. It was all
hands-on contemplation—no thinking
for once. Just unfiltered, dangerous
reaction.
I am my uncle, or rather,
his most gory ending.
When I began to fear death more
than I feared living, it crashed
over me like a green bottle
in the hands of someone who hates me.
Not a wave, not a car in a hurricane.
Pure glass. How peculiar, to know now
that this is in my blood, common
as a letter—to want to die one day,
then live the next.
Everyone knows fear can dissolve
into something new with exposure.
We are all trembling Polaroids,
getting on airplanes, holding snakes,
walking through high schools again,
getting out of bed for an hour.
Watch, as the chemicals I’m made of
develop in the dark, turn me into
an alone that is never lonely. Never.
Now, I dig graves, but don’t fill them
in rebellion.