Sluice-gate starlight floods me with its starved gaze: ah,
God. I call and expect an answering machine. But I hear
her voice              and wish I had never called.

She was practicing needle-point the kind where
it works best if your needle is dirty like the
            pussies of whores down at 13th street if you can
call them that, pussies, I mean. But she was
the kind of woman you’d call
            courageous, the mountain-climbing sort, lied like
Lucifer licking a fat jay closed with sweet eyes saying,
Oh honey. Have a drag. Tell me about your day.

I come over.
“Have you had anything to eat today?”
            there is Death in the room and I can smell his
            sluice-gate fingertip stains everywhere
“Not sure.”
I cry. The radio plays static and then switches to a commercial.

We play in sandbox platitudes and blame
Daddy for forgetting to cover our bottoms, young 

enough to look a boy, still, then      still felt like

one       heavy     bodyontopofme

​

Did you check the medicine cabinet?
I did.
And her journals?
Both.

She was a sidewalk girl.      in the rut of the street
    there is a scab she peeled off when she was ten
She dips the needle in the scabwound, fills the
    syringe with blood            so old even I’m
surprised it hasn’t oxygenized; she’s carefully kept it

hidden from others

these secret sluice gates we make in our childhood brains burst
when we least expect them to because we learn, from infancy,
that beauty can’t exist without trauma      I feel a void.
Approaching me in the eyes. They do not belong to her anymore.

What was in her journals?
Signs and stick figures.
And what did the signs say?
Nothing.

No, really, that’s what they said. Nothing.
And I think in the end—
When we collapsed into carpeted floor, laughing at the parody of life
            that is death and the parody of death that is life,
                        She was ready, Lord.
                        She was ready.

But I wasn’t. So when she flooded and Lucifer came swimming with his
      needle tip sharp and dripping, dirty fingertips smudging her living
            room into a spinning elephantine circus, whores
                        tricks, ball-gags and chains rattling,
                                                            animals on ketamine sliced open, unable to blink but feeling everything

My eyes were closed and I missed it all.

And when I opened them, again,
I found a belated birthday card in my mailbox.

Love, Aunt Muriel.

I missed it all.