I will write to you today, Dear Aunt Ella,
Getting ready for the big fight
With a letter this evening
Send me a paper of ice & flood
Even mountains & glaciers. We
Will drive a little - Separated:
We are as good as we are.

Sometimes I go to sleep because I’m afraid. Sometimes I wake up because I have walls. Walls around me are white, as they typically do, as they should do. I talk to you in the middle of a white chamber, a dungeon with a heart in it. I carry a red death cell at my center. You laughed so loud, and shrunk into a pair of red shoes. The night has kept dancing in them ever since, and I’ve become as black as my fear.

– – I can’t find my keys anywhere, sis.

Now I feel cold:

I forget I left my scarf behind in which winter.

The road home is long to go,

Long enough for me to recite the entire

Passage of spring learned on my own.

My Sis, I was thinking of you

Along the road,

& Remembered that I own names,

& Brown eyes hadn’t so gloom.

– What do we remember about the dead?

He flew so close to it, also

So far. She cut herself

When cooking. Scarlet dews.

He must’ve died like that –

Red salt of the earth.

He died like Bible,

The plates, foams reminded her of clouds.

They whom were upon there,

All precipitated.

The weather forecast didn’t say

It would rain this hard.

Gaunt streets, my shadow stitched to

The ever-lowing sunset,

Heels glued to the ground,

stuck in a muddy kiss.

And you kissed me nightmare,

With your absence in bed.

You fell asleep just a bit too soon

For me to ask your new address.

And I can’t perform the act of sleeping

Without your soul awakening on my stage,

For I’m beneficial to your dreams,

Yet the only prop you forget

to take with you along the way.

You gave me

the crimson stories in my arteries

half of the cocoon breeding life

& the entire universe

soaked in a womb.

On the other side of life’s myth:

You fold my pajamas

into the shapes of letters

that I never get to write to you.

But you still hold on tight

to the intangible thread

trying to stitch up

my lies, my salt, my wounds


stubbornly.

I almost forgot your favorite sunset brand

– Mine is the one persevered in the balcony at home

Where you first taught me how to smoke.

We didn’t go to the sea together for a long time,

Now I miss you like waves, like salt.

Now you never hear about my seventeen,

But I don’t know how to blame a man

Whose messy hair, grumpy mood

And wordy heart

Descends in his daughter.

No one has ever told me the name of my grandpa.

He died

On a morning when my father hadn’t met my mom.

In my dream: Grandfather holding scarlet ore

Walking towards me,

Melting, as if his palms are bleeding.

The young wooden knife of mine,

Carved a cross on the diary cover,

Imitating the glistening marks on grandmother’s calendar.

Bed towards the west, still

Tomb kissed by God.

Thus, I’m still a man who hasn’t had a religion,

Still awakens.

To those

Who lived without leaves:

And I remember you,

For we sprout, harvest and decay

In our lifetime.

Fluently we died in the form of soil

Where all variations of light

Recycle, resonate and

Repeat in harmony.

Your smudgy remarks diffuse into my pond of dreams,

Algae creeps onto my eyelids, casting greenish shades.

Harsh grains cling to the interior of my throat,

Slicing the pounding flesh into forceless bruise.

Seasons ago, you beckoned like estuary,

Hit like flood. I walked, barefoot, alone the shore,

Polished like pebble, mellow as soil.

Your winds undulated, and I bent like reeds. Then

Land altered, the elastic metal, the solid waves,

Melt, leached, gone.