I.
if loss has a memory,
it will be written to be lost;
like our names skimming the sand, retracing
impossible dreams, almost kissing
the quiet keels of froth,
nearly choosing
to be kept -
then released by the waves,
a shore that washes as it yearns.
while i stayed, your name shimmered
in a sea of words, one speckled sunspot
echoing without return:
i want to hear you again, if only
i can. but through this thin
and brittle shell pressed into the skin
of my earring, scream on bone, i hear only
the waves, and a missing voice
keening over the dream. and i think
to you i must be unhearing,
i must be only
a most
trivial thing.
but do you know that i still
watch the waves?
II.
once upon a trivial day,
we sliced the sun into sashimi,
and delivered its pieces to the open sea
to be brined by words.
the sun became a sunfish.
the sunfish was bottlecapped by pain.
the sunfish picked up a shell that whispered,
i want to hear you again.
then, the sunfish wrote a letter to God:
there is a kind of longing for which words are insufficient. it arises from the visuality of splendour - the photographs, the sun, the translucent sea. to have lost someone is not to see that they are utterly without you; it is to see that they are utterly happy without you. in this aquarium of amber, i am trapped, forever, on the other side of the glass. listening to the same thoughts, reverent, recursive, and resonant; closing my spine over the same undulating grief; feeling myself deshelled, a skeleton without organs, without flesh, without skin.
stripped of everything except my bones,
entrapped in a body that shows itself whole.
softer than bone, sharper than cartilage;
but still, she loved my bones.
III.
in this water of undulating echoes,
where every sound is felt as a tremor,
if the sunfish wanted to hear its bones,
would god let it dream of drums?
IV.
no one understood that i was a skeletal thing,
walking the ground of my own suffering.