I cannot measure vanishing, but
I feel you like a room in my chest
with the strangest architecture.
Every night, it snows skin pickings
until the white displaces you from form.
I cannot begin to understand this.
You call it kindness—assailing
coherence, as if we would have no body
to bury but scattered branches of shadow.
But there are facts you cannot reconcile
with goneness:
How our bodies hold a memory of that summer
boy and his palm’s pawpaw, how the flesh
gummed his teeth, and the sap soaked his collar,
and the laugh crashed out of him, a tidal wave.
How can I subtract you from sun?
No shade of light would remain intact.
