How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet. Hours lying on my back, my girlhood open. Once, I swallowed the rain through a whole green thunderstorm. How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer-only to pick up the pieces? If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish. The ship rocked as you swelled inside me: love’s echo hardening into a boy. *If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming. Why did you go so far? Just as a baseball bat crashes through the world. Everyone’s dancing while a tiny man and woman are stuck inside a green bottle thinking someone is waiting at the end of their lives to say Hey! You didn’t have to go this far. Everyone’s shouting or singing and he can’t tell whether the song is for him-or the burning rooms he mistook for childhood. There’s a ship in a wine bottle on the mantel in the middle of a Christmas party-eggnog spilling from red Solo cups. There’s a ship made from toothpicks and superglue. And here’s the kicker: there’s a cork where the sunset should be. He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.

He’s kissing the back of my wrist as he clutches the wheel. Look! he says, I see it now! He’s jumping up and down. He watches it open like a thief staring into his own heart: all bones and splintered wood.

I watch the syllables crumble into pebbles across the deck. The one where the book closes and turns to laughter in our laps. There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on. If we make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I let him cup a handful of the sea into my hair and wring it out. He crouches beside me, his breath a misplaced weather. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through. He said There is so much I need to tell you. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered from the bombed bakery. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. *When we left it, the city was still smoldering. We had been sailing-but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight. He lay beside me and placed a word on the nape of my neck, where it melted into a bead of whiskey.

While I slept, he burned his last violin to keep my feet warm. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft-no matter how soft her skin. If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. *Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us.

Night sky with exit wounds poems