I miss things, but I don’t say it anymore. My palms
are turned down against gusts taking themselves away.
I listen to wild parrots while I run between sycamores in the park.
I walk around uncomfortable in my jeans & wonder if the holes
were something I’ve made. I think about some things
so I don’t think about other things: pizza, poetry, Neosporin.
I eat my fried eggs out of a bowl shaped like a man’s hands.
The thin, gold rings on his fingers are still mine. I have
myself to remind me of my own love, but that’s all.
I tie tiny triangles of glass to string, wear it around my neck,
& some say it’s pretty. When my mother doesn’t recognize
the jewelry adorning me, hoping, she asks if it’s new.
And even though I am Mexican, feel deeply & joke dark,
God still owes me a drink for every time the woman I should be
has died. I no longer mean it when I say please. Sometimes words
belong between certain people & neither one is you.
Today, I feel like telling jokes instead of pretending to write good
songs & I am angry with the word should. I think about words
so I don’t think about loss, or all the feathers left on my porch.
I want to open the front door & see a clean bird that waiting for me
on the doormat like I’m Snow White, even if it has rusted forks
for wings. I once heard that the world breaks everyone
& afterwards many are stronger at the broken places. I wish
a different woman would wake up instead of me.
