i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.

In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow 
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting  
season, when the rains have appeased the land.

everything I am 
is wanting & needing/

every bone, every 
hollow, this image/

is a god fashion-made for you/

But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds. 
In the church of avian beings. 
Small, colorful, and endangered.

he insists, we lost the civil war 
because i kept aiming at a god, only i could see
hiding behind a cloud.

how do i tell him that he’s my grandfather 
& i wasn’t born until 28 years after the war?

but if I knew one person in the world who could die
for others, it was you,
if anything on this table is bitter, it must be my coffee
stripped of milk,

I don’t remember most of it
It’s been a decade since I descended from the hill with paper wings sewn into my back.

i am disgusted by what death

looks like even before the body begins to rot—

that being able to touch life into

unbecoming is not the kind of god i want to be.

i began:
god, swear my body is not a keepsake for all your silences.
swear you can’t hear these things droning like terrified frogs in my head.
swear you do not know that i am unwelcome in this body.

Have you collected enough of your things?
This house tugs at you
a little girl looking for coins
searching for language to smooth things over.