Songs After Dark

Reprise of the Little Match Girl

The saddest thing for a child to hear
is an ending; I only know this is true because

I, too, was young before. What I mean is that
there is a version of this story where the girl goes

cold & limbless into the white snow, and discovers herself
in a season without exit signs. It has been told before

and told many times, and I regret starting a story
with no headlights. What they do not tell you

when you are young is that not all stories have good lessons,
and there are even some that do not have lessons. Under the

evergreen foliage, the girl has two options, and the better one
does not want her. Youth is synonymous with abundance, and this is

why it is hard to imagine death as respite—past salted roadsides, boys in
evening light skinning through knees and braised cheeks,

she is caught suffering at the mouth of the abyss. Every time we come
to this bridge, I want to turn back and scream into the void.

But humor me: close your eyes, imagine she goes home, wherever
that means to a person. Imagine kindness in strangers. Imagine

a spared glance, a shooting star without pocketed foreboding.
The lesson: blasphemy is both an art and a mercy, depending on

your tolerance for finality. There go the birds again, high and so far
removed; feathers puffing to hide tiny ribcages, cardinals

small as red berries in this painting of a season, snow still falling
under the pastel streetlights, just like outside your window.

Go back to sleep, child. You are too young
for any of this to concern you.

Better Days

What brings you homeward to these stilled days—
at this bedridden hour too? The months have lazed
together since your departure, and in my dreams,
you marry someone else. It’s incredible to think

that the world, unprovisioned for, goes on without
everything leaving: when I open my door underneath
the threaded moonlight, the crepuscular plovers, even in
their final flight, are concrete against the blackened sky,

and the dusk-bitten hills are flattened but not gone.
I had been upset before, and what continuously ruins me
is the displacement of a body through sorrow, the broken
necks of flowers on my window sill. Some days,

I cannot bear to lift my own neck, cannot think about
your leaving apart from my lessening. Because I have never
known love to be weak, I took it to mean that I was.
My solitude, the incomprehensibility of a continuum, foreignness

of your salt-lit body, heightened foolishness of renewal—
my mother said that this would eventually
kill me, and so I have been sick for a long time, trying to fix myself.
Sometimes at night, I can remember how she looked before

she died: flaxen hair and always angry, but I can never stop hoping
in you—promise me you will stay from the blushing of this February to watch
the ghost crabs by the water next February, skirting across the sand.
Wipe the sweat off of my forehead, swallow my dashed hope—

the nights are swollen above bitter waves, they come and go.
We’ll have wheat bread underneath stilted rain, turn over all the sunsets.
My beloved, love is a wretched thing, but I will ask you to stay, all the same.
Accept me. I have given everything you could have asked.

Love you. Have not seen you for some time.

after Gabrielle Calvocoressi, for Cynthia Liu

But writing this for you and to you and want you to see it. Want it in print on the index of a magazine issue. Want you to like it. Want to ask if journals will publish writing if I do not have new sadness to slice & pass around. Cannot promise this. But still love you, even if it does not go anywhere but my wooden desk drawer. The other day: skipped breakfast for the first time, bent the bathroom mirror to climb into my skeleton. Thought of you in Kenmore & in Newbury, where ladders bisected red brick buildings, window panes with half-wilted succulents. Forgot that you are further than salted highways and blue Appalachian mountains worth of distance. Broke my skin over sidewalks. Do not like Boston as much as I should. On the weekend, told a heartbroken friend, I am sorry to hear about all of this. Know it did not help, but hope he will stop spending his nights crying. Wish that your nights are not spent that way. When thumbing through the stars, thought about if loneliness is equivalent to distance, why it is perceived as such, which variables constitute proximity. If a junction can be separated by commas. If language can make me bleed over my core. If the body knows dissection without poetry. If childhood is still love, even at its end. Love you. Want editors to love me as well. It is okay, this jawlined ache. Still cannot forfeit the belonging, the lick of distinction—

Miss you. Dreamt of writing a poem for you and it was so sweet that I woke before dawn.