& this is where you stand with a gun the size of American centuries that has already entered your boyish body but in this version of the lullaby the gun isn’t loaded with bullets but the teeth of those who sang you your first name it sounded like bones rattling against each other in the back of your throat until you could finally say the xạyxạyx ̣ like the once silvered color of a standing skeleton against the backdrop of a sky-sized moon holding itself together with pins that look nothing like rusted barbs but bird beaks desperate to open & call out to the thinning air to please please take me back to the paradise where we learned to breathe again to let me breathe with the sound of every child running down streets of squares made in the age of another war held to itself like a suicide in the closet of your best friend who said let me tell you everything everything will be better so don’t worry I’ll see you tomorrow & what she meant was I’m not planning on coming back but I do I do love you enough to be the last person I wanted to see & that means your body is enough to carry the image of her before looking in the mirror & letting the world decide what to do with the body when we must first carry her to the mountain you call home & calling out her name to the wind moving through the pine branches like wind chimes that hold your voice in their grip & crumbles it along the dirt road like facedown breath kicked from the ceremony of your mouth & someday the sunlight will kiss you once & turn as black as your shadow along the wall of your father’s prison cell before he decided to kill another man with his bare hands because anyone can kill a man but I can do it better so you never saw him until you cut open your finger along the shining body of a knife he gave you to keep under your bed for the nightmares are coming they’re coming be ready for every nightmare be a man ain’t no goddamn dream catcher gonna do shit for you & so here’s some ‘shrooms too & you know the color of your blood is the same color of a murderer who only wanted to live as another human & that’s what we mean when we are told to enter the story told in another language your ghosts still talk to you in we hear the voice enter the body like a swallowed sword how it scrapes the vertebrae of your spine that you can turn into a makeshift ladder to another life anytime you want & you’re alone again aren’t you you’re alone at the edge of an ocean that never asked you to come there is an orange tree that stands naked & never cries until you turn your back & walk toward the one-eyed moon that hides its wrecked face like another god calling your name but never your family name because it’s too long & forgotten to remember like the palm on your chest when you say where’s the mystery in the light & the voice inside your head is answering that it’s the dark & you’ll never find it as long as you keep your eyes open now close your eyes & remember how you came this far without losing yourself to another war on your American body another war on your ghost-like skin another war holding itself to the horizon-colored window of your room when everyone who you love is only farther away the longer you breathe & tonight when you dream you plan on never breathing again just enough to touch & be touched but someone saying something like manáa wees? means only that you forget for a second whether the dream knows you’re never coming back this far again until every light in the world turns off for one solid minute you find inside a bottle with a small animal inside whispering to you I came looking for you & found myself shipwrecked on this island of erased butterflies & unopened jawbones & you know the animal’s name in your grandfather’s language that was beaten from him & you say I’m Telemachus it’s so nice to meet you again father but you’re only lying enough to feel the heat on your back from a city imagined & meant to be burning but you wake up on a boat in the dock of the port with everyone in the village asleep until morning & you’ve been crying the whole night with a gun there & a tooth-sized bullet with a note that reads love—your Father ’íinim pist is nothing like saying daddy or darling darling hold me here because it’s night & this single ocean isn’t going anywhere only you are only you are going somewhere as far as your body will let you so ask your shadow anything & remember don’t worry don’t worry you’re not going to die I promise I swear the night always falls that this is the end of everything unless you remember that the salt water is only as black as the inside of your eyelids & this is where you stand with the gun the size of centuries & now take it from your spent mouth & enter the warmth of the water where you yes you—you who believed that everything changes despite the loss of light—you were once made of too many midnights running under a terrified American sky & now made to make this body beautiful again.