SoundlessWhispers

We are blooming with vacant pleasantries, hands miming gardens out of air. We cradle a silence that cannot be pruned, holding quiet vigil for second chances. Repeat funerals in barren soil, because this is not the second time, nor the third or fourth. But again, we contort ourselves into planters and we fertilize with hope. We plant seeds, and we may not know what will grow, how to nurture a fragile, living thing, but we know the shape of space taken - stolen or given. We may not know the pace or the patience to trust what's sowed, but we do know how to brace for unknowns; palms uncertain of how to hold life in deserts, coax the quick rhythms of pollinators buzzing to and fro. Might spring flourish, and pin satisfaction between our hands, the tips of our thumbs turning green. As long as we have hope. As long as we know the shape of gardens.

I watched those oxygen tubes snake into you like translucent parasites, rather than donors feeding you oxygen as if you were a deflated balloon, skin sallow and paper-thin, as if upon you I could write poetry. I could hear an avalanche in your every breath. You tried to laugh through each burial, and when your voice shook, we both, with such synchronicity, heard the monitor counting down seconds rather than heartbeats. There was a ghost in that sterile room, in that white silence between seconds. We were spelunking fear through the claustrophobia, stripped naked. I struggled to parse apart the whiteout, trying to orient time and direction. I wanted desperation - search and rescues, alchemic formulas and philosophers’ stones… What I found was a sparseness that echoed, and I ate my guilt gluttonously, like I was starving penance. Wishing that upon you I could write odes… but there is no ink for the storm happening around us and between us; only that

We are blooming with vacant pleasantries, hands miming gardens out of air. We cradle a silence that cannot be pruned, holding quiet vigil for second chances. Repeat funerals in barren soil, because this is not the second time, nor the third or fourth. But again, we contort ourselves into planters and we fertilize with hope. We plant seeds, and we may not know what will grow, how to nurture a fragile, living thing, but we know the shape of space taken - stolen or given. We may not know the pace or the patience to trust what's sowed, but we do know how to brace for unknowns; palms uncertain of how to hold life in deserts, coax the quick rhythms of pollinators buzzing to and fro. Might spring flourish, and pin satisfaction between our hands, the tips of our thumbs turning green. As long as we have hope. As long as we know the shape of gardens.

Initialization of creation bedsheet ghost - the intangible becomes matter, quasar breath of foreign nebulas ejected; drifting how do I navigate constellate entire broken galaxies looking for recognition systems only outlined I am witness and bystander to these chalk outlines and their crime scenes and my own outline flickers like a dying star how do I let go of something I never realized I was holding, my white knuckles blending in the white mortician’s sheet a blank slate a disinfectant wipe a way to enshroud a narrative so lost to time it is viewed through radiation histories; I am over-exposed and just like curing cancer, when a poison becomes a cure, when does haunting become possession? when does believing you're fine manifest? when does the poltergeist of hope begin knocking all the fucking pictures off the walls? I never thought time would become Salvador Dali's floppy clocks bookmarking reversals, progressions, overwrites... I never thought the

not an arachnid dot on the spider web wavelength of timelines: we are the flies twelve faces to gluttony, static intermingling white-noise haze like that over the eyes of San Francisco Bay, blinking open into sea glass washed ashore