myfallfromgrace

My boyfriend watched, open mouthed as I unscrewed the lid of your urn, and ran my fingers through your ashes. Your depression, your soul dust. I felt an ocean rolling under my ribs and an urge to cradle your urn, rock you back and forth like you did for me when I was young. - At the funeral, my uncle announced that you hated religion. But he left out the part where you did believe in a God, just that he was always punishing you. - “There was nothing you could have done” said the other uncle. I think of all those spent wishes, the birthday candles extinguished for gifts, the meteor showers I wasted on love, the prayers offered from

No one believes in ghosts I said - no sweet wisps lingering in the breath between dusk and dawn. No fragile thinlings pulling at the doors or making the curtains shimmy with an uncle’s last breath. They do not balk at flowers - lilies and hibiscus clawing the corners, or ungathered  words that spill under doorframes. But sometimes late at night I feel the pinch of air - the scent of ashes dancing in the garden where she once held court and the mirrors going dark.

Sunday morning and our bodies tangle embroiled in opposing currents, folds and swells stirred inward, like the marbled edges where Jupiter's bands of storm meet here, our limbs find an improbable traction where there should be none; find something to push from in the blank space of a bed kicked bare here, perhaps ghosts grant us leverage from their side; a foothold, an anchor for knee or elbow, to better position one’s weight and movement against the other’s leverage to better bridge their own state one stage closer to return; this better bridge begins from the destination, in the creation of new feet to carry them back here,