there is something rather big about wholeness.

to meet the entirety of one's own self where you stand

with the palms of your feet pressed against the belly of the earth.

you can feel her as she breathes against your skin,

bare foot, back, chest, and naked bending against the light

like fingertips scraping against the stars.

there is something that writhes under skin.

sometimes you can see it - feel it, a great expansiveness curling into your chest - 

all of it burning in reckless abundance and white-light brilliance

that seems to look like you.

passive impulsivity breaks the seams of smoke

and smears on your forehead where there are cracks

(the whole of your shell seems like it's splitting

and you try not to impede the growth).

there are creases where your eyes fall,

opaline and crescent paling and cobalt,

ebb of rib where breath meets bone

and swells and seeps phantasmic into chest,

an extrapolation of body into heart into sky

that almost tastes like absolution.

do not be afraid of it.

one day you will see yourself and say "this is beautiful" - 

color yourself like water and plant yourself in the moon.

let your baobab roots run thick enough to burst 

and do not run from the implosion.

do not be afraid to collide with the enormity and absolve into it.

here is whole.

here is you.

here is home.

saltwater silt sticks to your toes

son of man, made marrow

made milk and honey.

silver cipher seldom slivering

she steps on stones at night when not

light not bright she bails and breathes.

child lusters like alabaster as she sleeps;

saltwater singing the selkie song.

icicle snow-bites

cylindrical spheres like soft

like slipping like sleep.

hoarfrost catacombs comb through your hair, sinking ciphers into polarities you try to touch. (they are magnetizing.) calcifying clay into crystals, you coil yourself from the sun. it burns somewhere beneath the clouds–an opposing creation quelling icy water over your feet.

some days are quiet.

dragonflies curling between

your toes do not wake.

phosphenes feather-kiss your eyelids when you look at the sky. charcoal contrails spatter against clouds that hang like dead-weights; fractals sink to skin and make a home there–an impulsivity that spits back at you. glass spires stick to the palms of your hands and you can feel the cold when you breathe. it stands straight in your lungs.

there is solace in

freezing. cobalt catches the

quilt on your shoulders.

he watches the wind. sleeping chromatic

and kaleidoscope dreams like drunken moon,

purple distortion curling phantasmic

and psychadelic lilac cocoon.

seafoam cinders like copper tea kettles,

he has eyes like wildflowers and seashells;

white calla lilies and pink rose petals

oceans like mint and saturated cells.

thin glass bottles, cedar wine on his lips,

he steps before the Sun King on a high

like Elysium closing fingertips,

pale; he is falling into open sky.

stillness swelling in surrealist cascades,

he sinks; shifting spine, sifting shoulder blades.

I have never been subject to endings.

they never really seem real until they've happened and

even when they're gone it's still hard to believe in them.

I think I find it easier not to believe in them.

it is always easier to believe in nothing than in something.

departure tastes foreign despite its familiarity

and it pushes back as much as I do.

time itself is illusive in its passages and

perception burns until it breaks to the obliquity of the breach

and we seethe in it.

learn to understand yourself.

learn to understand the architecture of your skeleton where it hangs,

the suspension of your weight and your bones

that crackle when you touch them.

there is belonging where you look for it and it lusters

when it lets itself surround you.

make like skin

and stretch to see yourself

and shed the dead parts that accumulate under your fingernails

and do not ignore them.

understand the deserving of fullness.

understand that bending does not equate to satiation.

you are actualizing.

don't forget to breathe.

i

watercress condensation sticks to your fingers and melts.

it is monday and you are slicing iceberg lettuce for the salad

and at dinner you sit and hold hands around the table to pretend

nothing is different. make like you don’t see cells unfolding

into ash in a small pot on the fireplace mantle; make like you don’t see

decomposition. you like to pick at the dead skin under your fingernails.

(sometimes it is the only acceptable place for dead things to lie.)

you know that dust is primarily made up of human skin and

you wonder if the urn on the mantle has ever spilled. it is wednesday

and your mother loves you the same she always has, but you are coming alive

as she is withering away and sometimes you’re scared

of breathing in her cells, her skin; you wonder if she is in the dust.

it builds up in corners and on the old dinner plates you keep

in the glass-cased cabinet like tiny secrets clenched between your teeth.

you wonder if you are in the dust, too.

ii

on friday you plant crocuses in the backyard. (she always liked crocuses.)

purple petal lips sprouting from soil that squishes between your toes

remind you of her. they furl from finger to hip,

and you imagine them curling acquiescent cadaver, crested and

callous against pelvis sunken and serpentine like white stars caged and ribbed.

you saw her body, afterward.

her eyes were still open and fixed on the doorway where you stood

and you felt naked. her skin sagged over shoulder blades that stuck out

like chasmic artifices you could touch and fall into;

you could feel the stillness pressed into you. (heavy dehumanization.)

you’ve never been afraid of death–you can stomach the deadweight–

but you didn’t expect to feel the absence. it burns like ephemeral gold.

you open the window in the kitchen.

the smoke of it makes your eyes water.

iii

you think you might just be hollow.

sunday makes a week and your family doesn’t really talk about it.

you went alone to the crematorium, all full of caskets and black boxes

big enough to swallow you. you watched them carry her in

and started to wonder what kind of a person would choose to work

in such a place where the air is stale on your tongue

and the walls push back at you until all you’re made up of is cotton webbing.

it’s a strange place to bring a dead person to.

they must be more deserving than a cold metal table and

dingy waiting rooms. expensive wine glasses and heavy china

cannot equate to this. this was once a person.

you touch the urn on the mantle. this was once a person.

you swore you could smell it.

flesh burning, smoking, sizzling, old blood thick like barbeque

spilling and swelling into dust.

you are quiet as you spread and sprinkle her over the purple flowers,

imagining her stretching into them and stilling.

you think you must be the only one thinking of her.

the eulogy was short.

you think, perhaps, death must make vestigial creatures of us all.

thunderstorm watching

under alabaster sheets

you swell and you sleep

I like it when you fall asleep on my chest. curled and twisted, your body over mine and I like the smell of your skin against my neck.

I will burn through such

light like honey and you will

dance like lilac smoke

sometimes you move, tiny twitches into shoulder blades or fingers tied tighter around my shirt. I think you're unaware of it.

sunflowers thinning

pearlescent petals on your

lips I kiss so sweet.

these are flowers of the wind.

this ground knows the contours of your face

and the weight of your toes

and sometimes you can feel the earth breathe

as it swells beneath your feet.

there is a strange feeling to coming home,

to stretching into the same cotton sheets

and breathing into the same sky

just as when your eyes were a little younger,

your skin was not creased,

your bones still stretching against muscle for the first time.

but your bones are paler, now,

your skin has spilled six times since last you were here

and you have eyes of old moons.

(it’s never quite the same.)

how strange it is, then, to unfold into it all again,

lungs breathing in tandem with greying daylight,

expanding and lifting just as they always have.

the orangey kitchen light is a frayed familiarity;

the jazz,

the loud rapture,

the people that smell like something that creaks

like the floorboards in your emptied bedroom.

frost curls over soil worn by prairie winters

and you are listening to saxophones on a scratchy record player

as you crawl into the comfort of coming home.

(you sometimes wonder why the mouth of the sky never seems to change.)

there are many days I spend on my back

stretching my arms to fit the sky

as it spills across mountain peaks,

casting gold against shadows in blue

spine attached to string,

lifted,

palms facing the sun,

I hold the earth inside my stomach

the silence opens in the core of the horizon

and everything is so loud and so quiet

as it swells into all that it is,

so large and so small

I fill the empty space with gilded light

incandescing against the fringes of nightfall

parallel wavelengths meeting the eye of the sol,

blinking

static spiraling beneath the skin,

I like to imagine my cells absorbing light like honey

as my body collapses into midnight

there is something disjointed in falling asleep,

in curling into a crook in the mountains

only to wake up again between

cotton bedsheets and the smell of my mother,

a familiarity I cannot name that clings to my shirt

when I dream, I am gone again,

silence blossoming in the prairie,

body weightless

to empty out is to sit in the belly of the earth,

to feel lungs filling and letting out;

stretch toward the sun

and drown in the mouth of the sky

honestly, it was different than what I was expecting.

it wasn't sparks and heat and hands on the back of my neck

pressing knees into thighs and breaths into lips,

a sudden burst of uncontained passion finally actualizing

into something physical.

something we could both touch.

it wasn't innocence and grinning

rosy and hasty and clumsiness trapped onto tongue

big eyes and gushing and giggling into cheeks

like children would.

it was quiet and easy and our fingers were freezing,

still and hesitant and careful and trying not to breathe too hard

and then it was gone.

(and I could still feel her lips against my mouth.)