My shoulder is a cradle for the sore part of your head, my collarbone a grand canyon to hold the secrets you couldn’t tell back then. I always see October in your eyes. If I told you this, would you hear? The sky is parting and I can almost see beyond it. My hands are parting and you can fit between them. My lips are parting and you ask if this is silence still.
Did I ever tell you? Have I ever told you? Your body is home and so is mine, my head a roof unpainted, my eyes an attic window. There are bats up here unfolding themselves into the night air, the same color as the horizon at dusk, and I wonder how I can feel so invisible and so big at the same time, a pane of glass across a busy sidewalk. When I was small sometimes I found birds who had flown into our kitchen window, the guilt like pennies in my mouth, bloody copper taste, one grey feather still stuck to the glass, nausea settling, a stagnant pond in my belly. But sometimes when I was small I’d be sitting on the porch steps and a hummingbird would stop inches from my knee then be gone, a streak of green fading. My heart hovers in my chest, humming, never resting, always, always, always. Here it is, for you. There it goes, for you, for you, for you my friend.
If I told you these stories, would you see? If I say, “red,” do you picture a tulip on the third day in May, throat opening? Do you picture blood blooming crimson on my thigh, body opening? Do you see the red insides of my mouth, jaw gaping, words almost here?
Place yourself in my open palms, place your body in my open doorway on the afternoon I least expect it, my shocked hands dropping a half-washed bowl, our hearts quickening, disbelieving, voice almost a dream. If I wake up tomorrow and you’re beside me on my white sheets, I would think this might be every day, that the time you were gone was a memory mistaken, like the peacocks in the yard when I was five, the feathers they left behind, the years that passed before I realized they were never there. How could I imagine a peacock if I’d never seen one? Did the turkeys in my memories take on the color of the June blueberries, the pictures of their feathers stained by the color of my sister’s eyes? Is any of this real? Where have we been? Where are we now?
I am a September night with a breeze for you to come home to. I told you this once and you looked at me like you were seeing me for the first time and not at all, like your eyes were somewhere else and maybe I was there too. I look behind me and don’t see the ghost reflected in your irises. I pull on my grey sweater, suddenly chilled, my arms like birds plucked naked, the winter a memory frozen to my tendons. I’ll wake up tomorrow with icicles on my cheeks. They’ll melt into ocean water on your tongue. When you tell me what you see, I promise I’ll try to listen.
jenny did it 