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somebody once told me you can hear the northern lights. I want to. my lover tells me the northern lights are charged particles in the atmosphere making and breaking bonds like all of our thousand lives reincarnate on flash-forward. I want to hear that. I want to rear up on my hind legs like a Kermode bear and listen for the quiet exclamations and sighs, for the cacophony of sounds that everyone, even electrons, make when they break bonds, for a chance to see it from a distance. all those new beginnings and endings. all that beauty. all that quiet, after. ---

When I breathe into the empty blue morning, my breath fogs up in the too-cold-for-this-time-of-year air and I wish I could pull it back into me. I'm not quite awake and not quite asleep, but I'm conscious of the day and the time and the rain that prickles my face through the open screen window. I wish you a quiet happy birthday under my breath because I might have lost the right to make you happy, but I'll still wish it forever. Your name on my lips hurts and it's a struggle to move the air past my vocal cords in a way that will actually produce sound instead of a whisper. I keep you so close to my heart that every time it beats it touches y

A woman says take me home and you are struck by the fear that you will not know how to touch her right, that you have unwittingly made it this far without her knowing that this was not supposed to be your life, a life your father does not speak of and your mother doesn't understand, her eyes heavy and sad. This is the kind of life that the dishes will be the undoing of, a glass handled carelessly one day will break in your hands and that will be the thing you finally can't handle, your body crumpling against the sink, the weight of your mother's sadness, the bitter emptiness of your father's goodbye on the phone, your last trace of