“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”

“The moon is sick
Of pulling at the river, and the river
Fed up with swallowing the rain,
So, in my lukewarm coffee, in the bathroom
Mirror, there’s a restlessness
As black as a raven
Landing heavily on the quiet lines of this house.
Again, the sun takes cover
And the morning is dead
Tired of itself, already, it’s pelting and windy
As I lean into the pane
That proves this world is a cold smooth place.

Wind against window—let the words fight it out—
As I try to remember: What is it
That’s so late in coming? What was it
I understood so well last night, so well it kissed me,
Sweetly, on the forehead?

Wind against window and my late flowering brain,
Heavy, gone to seed. Pacing
From room to room and in each window
A different version of a framed woman
Unable to rest, set against a sky
Full of beating wings and abandoned
Directions. Her five chambered heart
Filling with the panic of birds, asking: What?
What if not this?”

“Medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight—the measure of a human soul. He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong. Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear time line he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed in a silvered sky. Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles: the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.”

“I met a wonderful new man! He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”