I can’t write. A high
buzzing hum scrapes
and skitters in my skull
like a busted fax machine
irreparable, corrupting
every if-then-else with
a sick electric hiss, a trap
between the factory in
my brain and the delivery chute
dribbling whiskey, aka
my mouth. A penny for my thoughts
overpaid, save it
for the train tracks, zinc
and copper flattened, heads and tails
spread smooth, inseparable,
forever two-dimensional,
asemantic, catachrestic,
insoluble
and inkless.

desperate for an answer, for absolution,
for escape.

Under the wet cherry twist of your pagan lips
I prayed

to the god who’d abandoned us.
Choking

on my faithless tongue and the terror crackling
in your eyes,

I prayed
for your deliverance, and not my own.

You gave me my first LiveJournal account, back when
you had to know someone to get in. You were the only
someone I knew. I was 18 and it was meaningless
and meant everything. I was reading your LiveJournal
when I realized I loved you. Laini, I wrote a poem
that used the word “LiveJournal” three times. A serious
poem about death and regret, a poem that wants
to be a message in a bottle from me to the memory
of you, and I said “LiveJournal” four times, and I did it
because I knew it would make you laugh.

The sound of living bark being pulled
from the trunk of a tree.

A box of broken glass. The texture of the edges
where they cross, where they grind.

Tire blown, rim shrieking, bare metal spilling sparks
down Jasper Avenue in the dark.

And let there be laid upon his body iron and stone,
as much as he can bear, or more.

The pencil sharpener’s whirling burrs.
The pencil diminishing.

The day we spent downtown, ducking
into doorways, nerdy white boys laughing
at the raindrop drips from the tips
of our drowned-rat hair, slipping
into the science fiction stacks, watching you
watch my hands touch paperbacks.