But in another life you are holding your father’s hand on the way to the laundromat, he has 

pennies in one pocket, you in another. You are drawn and quartered between

his thumb and the gutter and the glass in the sidewalk and a cloudless sky,

you are in bed before nine you are in the hospital with stitches up your leg. 

The stethoscope is your umbilical cord, your mother is your ribcage, 

your whole body was once nothing 

but a heart.

You are not too clever. You don’t have to be too clever to come home. 

Open the roof to a house where the window is open in the kitchen. 

1. Wash a cup.

2. Drink from it again. 

3. Put it in verse. 

Someone laughs on the other side of the wall and you lay down

your hand to feel it tremble. 

You feel them

(all of them)

in it. 

Grieve their ankles where all the blood rushed and

grieve the books they read and the silverware they stole. 

Grieve their hair. 

You fill your chest with missing them until the apertures overflow, 

until they fold their hands around your hollows.  

You practice for the day you leave.

You try it in the bath and in the closet

and sitting up in bed.

Yes, you have to leave over and over again, 

it has to be muscle memory

Lung Memory

until it doesn’t choke you. 

To memorize: write it twice, say it once, stitch it into your mother’s dress instead of the flesh 

of your palm. 

In another life you draw with chalk on the sidewalk 

while a moth spins through your hair. 

And you get up to chase it

and you scrape your knees

and the streetlamps are turning on soon

and it’s the first warm night of spring 

and

You’re overfilled with it and there’s not yet any wanting.

You’re in the sandbox and you’re playing house and you’re digging down deep enough to hit water. 

You’re at a demolition site with dust in your mouth

and you might be the smallest bit terrible.

You learn to love it very hard. It doesn’t end when you walk away.