I want to tell the birds your name.

So that they may carry it on their wings:
So that they may carry it through their flight
The letters making up you—
I want you to exist in freedom

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that
Your name is heavy where it rests across my ribs
And I crave to carve out this weight

My darling—you deserve to exist in lightness
And in flight. Freedom.

I don’t know. Maybe you deserve to exist at all times,
So insistently you wrap my bones in your hold.
Like you’re becoming me. Like I’m you.

I want to tell the birds your name:
Gravel embedded into my knees where I held your head in the driveway
Where I cried so quietly instead of screaming: implosion. Un-forgiveness.
I still choke on the absence of grave dirt, how I would have laid there next to you if they let me bury
you. If my body had been my own, I would have dug our grave with my own hands, ripped away every
goddamn fingernail. Slippery blood. Self-immolition. It’s an old story.

I want to watch the birds with you, I want to watch their flight
Whose names are they carrying? Which grief are they moving?
Because they’ve forgotten mine. Mine is lying against my ribs,
Flightless—hope-less.

They could have flown you into the graveyard,
Where you are safe and whole and I may
Visit from time to time.
They could have flown you into the earth, returned,
Where wildflowers suddenly bloom and
The sun kisses the ground in dapples.

The thing is, it’s been years and I’m still picking the gravel out of my
kneecaps, Still clawing at the dirt under my fingernails, the death-stench it’s
taken on.

I want to tell the birds your name. I rip this sentiment from bone marrow.

But I hold you close to my heart, with more selfishness than the universe intended.
And this grief bends me, but I do not want the birds to carry it any further from
me.
To heal may be to become unbound, Promethean suffering,
Letting go, cataclysmic failure, where all grief was once only
love.

So—I shoot the birds from the sky. And watch them fall
In blood and feathers.

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