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I remember his eyes seeing more than they could,
as if the right sight might surround and slow down time,
and mine catching hold of the secret way he would
grasp to mold his most elusive possession, life.

We used to sit staring side by side on the porch.
The day’s soft, steady fade for the moon’s sudden torch
always amazed me. Such changes remained behind:
hide and seek, do-see-do creek, gold I couldn’t find.

The scene seemed real enough, until one day I saw
the light’s slight lean, as if some subtle shade was drawn,
like walls, so paper thin, they hardly stop the wind,
the sheer sound round the realm we lived and breathed in.

He claimed an afterlife in nature was his fate.
I picked the distance apart; my eyes logged on late.
The summer a never-ending sorrow weighed in,
seated, sobbing, suddenly I saw his vision:

the hills, a man’s face, silent sentinel of space.
It looked so much like him; I think his mind did win.

I can’t squeeze my eyes shut when I think about
The open casket
It grabs my eyelashes like the reigns of a horse
I try to blink onto sandpaper
And sleep on a bed of nails
Or in the world; warm that I remember you in
It’s 3 o clock P.M. and I can have the windows cracked.
I haven’t perfected the art of counting tiles on a hospital oor yet
Or telling myself you look like you did when you weren’t motionless
Pretending like I’m comfortable eating from a
Meat tray in a funeral home
Or trying not to think about how you waited for me
To walk into the hospital room
before you atlined.
Your face looks funny stretched across a memorial candle
That we don’t burn, but leave stagnant on a dusty shelf
Sometimes I look up your obituary to convince myself
It’s purple in my search history
-KM

Did you ever stop to think,
About the stars that twinkle and blink?
In the fleeting night sky,
That is filled with gleams soaring high.

Did you ever stop to think,
About the flowers that grow?
In the pits of the sun,
Showered by spits of rain
and dancing with the wind for fun?

Did you ever stop to think,
To notice the water that lingers?
Racing with the rain or shine,
Always streaming forward.

Did you ever stop to think,
The simple joys life can bring?
Every moment has a memory obscuring,
And with the right mindset,
This concept can be quite alluring.

Brown eyes cocker spaniel mournful,
when you’re home, all of you,
my wife, children
my sisters and brothers and cousins and their wives and husbands
then I’m so happy,
this house is alive, brimming.
Wherever I turn
I walk into grandsons, nephews, nieces,
tender new sprouts with differently similar faces, mannerisms,
I can’t move without touching somebody,
touching love,
that’s the way a house should be,
merry and full.
I look at him
and see his family through his eyes,
a carpenter’s production,
lives nailed together
lumpy and rough in some spots, smooth in others
but always joined.
I look at him and see daddy dear
dadaji bhaiya jeeja mausa aaja thakur pundit Sir,
so many lives in one.

Inpatient Hospice

You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.

I breathed through your infamy
at graduation,
mingled, carried my orphaned part,
discarded in a scattering
of peers.

Your socked feet shake now,
betray what you outran:
weakness.
Face compressed to grooves, you
strain to unriddle me.
Your neck, the bruises,
an ardor of decomposition.

You mouth Yoplait,
stilled by the TV’s shifting colors
where an Olympian spirals.
A nurse checks the infusion.

I can’t piece
the fragments
we are
to make you solid
and keep me safe.
You cut my lyric free
of source.

In quiet tones, a song is spun,
A tribute whispered to the sun.
It speaks of those who’ve gone ahead,
Yet lingers softly where they tread.

Each line a bridge, a gentle stream,
Connecting life to love’s deep dream.
The past and present intertwine,
Through words that shimmer, hearts align.

A melody of loss and light,
Transforms the dark, renews the night.
In every tear, a star will rise,
A beacon bright in endless skies.

It carries sorrow, yet bestows
A peace that only memory knows.
Through whispered winds and tender rain,
It offers solace in the pain.

For love persists beyond the veil,
Its gentle whispers never fail.
Though shadows fall, their light will stay,
A quiet song to guide the way.

hope / is a secret / is closed doors / is nestled in the way wind softens when it meets glass / is the hum of the kettle before it sings to the plant on the windowsill you water even though it hasn’t sprouted / is the smell of banana bread before it’s done baking / is the jewel-toned dreams I’ve been having lately / is the unlit room at the end of the hall / is your grandmother’s cockatiel singing the both of them to sleep / is the way your phone hums after months of silence / is their voice crackling through bad reception telling you they always knew you’d call / is the memory of laughter braided so tight it still feels like a handshake across state lines / is the shared shorthand for everything that hurts the way they know before you’ve got the courage to say it / is their silence on the other end of the line filling the gaps you couldn’t manage to close yourself / learning to dance to the sing of the sting / is the ache that feels lighter when split between two / is the matching necklaces we got when we were fourteen the metal worn down tarnished by time and sweat and things we thought we knew / is the things we keep heavy around our necks like something we can’t let go of / is not dazzling not loud not the sharp bite of joy but the soft breath of maybe / is the quiet hum of waiting / is the feeling of something coming home

I guess I’ve never felt like a woman
or a woman-shaped something stuffed
with satin daisies and surrounded by soft
flaps of labia cupping the outside like a
body bag or maybe I guess I’ve never
really felt like a wo-man or a hu-man or
any word suffixed by man

I’ve felt what alone sounds like a small
child five or six crouched knees on the
sidewalk of the motel waiting for Mother
to return I noticed an open numbered door
and an infant two or three months crying
on the rung mattress against the wall

I’ve felt what weight may mean an adult
eighteen or nineteen and a man pointing to
the blood I left on his dorm mattress and my
eyes unable to notice a color other than
the heavy coated red

I’ve felt what beautiful could mean whenever
I’m alone and I can hear less people asking
for me to pay attention I can close my eyes and
picture myself a puddle or a cat or a bowl
that you could put the nicest things into

And I guess a bowl or a cat or a puddle
could all be vaginas or vagina shaped things
wet things or new things or things
very alone but what I see inside
is a thing I can’t trace and a wetness that feels
sticky heavy bears red blood tears of infants
alone

I guess I’ve never really felt like a woman or
a person connected to the humps of my body or
thickness of my blood I often wish to be
a cerulean insect whose iridescent wings
glow red only in the peak of light and whose
lifespan is only long enough to learn
what together feels like

This week, I learned how to measure myself for a cock
ring. It only takes a piece of string and pen. Memory
of fractions comes rusty, finding a common denominator
is almost as hard as finding a lover. If my friends asked
me to teach them, I’d let them drop trou, wrap soft
teal yarn behind scrotum and over the base of their
member, mark a line like a parent to a door frame, teach
them to wear our shame like a crown. I do this, because
I love them. I love them in the dark room harnessed
and jockstrapped. I love them when they’re fucking
bottoms off Grindr. I love them when I pray to God,
and there’s a joke hidden here about kneeling, but I’ve
floated my face to VHS cleaner like birthday candles
enough to know you are a wish come true my sister,
with your estranged parents and disbelief in God,
so when I say I pray for you I mean, give me your
shame, and I will stake wax letters that spell out faggot
atop strawberry cake, laugh in the face of what and
who has tried killing us, and maybe we live fast,
because we never expected to be here this long,
like the circle of life is holding back your blood
long enough to stand up and shoot.

I don’t remember your voice.
Only twenty good photographs sheathed from the box,
displace your face, mostly a distant mystery—
the wide brow in sunlight or distorted darkness of deep-set eyes.
A camera’s blurred lens creates the shadow I cannot lighten.
Your sleeves were buttoned at cuff, or rolled,
though always tucked and proper,
clothes to fit occasions, farm or social, each the same.
You were so at ease among family,
laughter sometimes consumed your face, broke the stone-like illusion
of austerity that these images endow upon the mind.
You still intrigue me after all the years that lie between these pictured thoughts of ink.

I was five or six when you died, vague memories unforgotten,
images, gestures; grandma reaching into the casket for
my father’s father, who planted twelve pines
of mystic shape, even as some had scoffed.
There were places among hill-rocks of the house whose
boards were made from trees of this very land.
Match-box cars made tiny roads,
diamond glints of sandstone— imagined treasure my Tonka hauled.
You let me climb to the wood’s edge,
not as far as ridges, shallow caves or cliff ledges,
and your eyes could see my every move.
Though you would often only grin, sometimes I made you laugh.

There is not much I can know of you except through other people.
You left no journal, no thoughts, only catalogs of cattle sales,
store receipts and timber logs in forty-three;
tools, farm clothes, the few coins your sweat allowed.
What can I learn of you in photographs without forensic attitudes—
only how your face had changed, pieces of your character
through time revealed in subtle gestures now and then;
how you held your mother’s hand, the anger, mystery sometimes your eyes convey.
Tobacco-jawed beside a gutted buck hung in a tree,
another has your arms crossed, leaned back on
split pieces, wood you cut in summer heat;
one, with down-cast eyes, you break into a smile or rifle back a sleep-eyed leer.

I can’t remember your voice.
You exist in a place of half-mystery,
alluring unrecorded thoughts that question:
what have I imposed on things that I have seen
in this questionable space of black and white,
incomparable with fact or fixed brick in a world beyond knowledge?
The myth I made of your memory
was like a mirror of my own beliefs.
I realized, perhaps, even you had those flaws from years ago,
a lesser shade of hate, though I told myself you were just like me.
The seven-circle pattern of your infant’s gown creates a flower’s image.
You let me climb and climb and climb.

Dirt-worn boots tell their own about your work,
your life from day to day in pasture fields.
I could only wish the dust of life to cling to me the same.
Let me not forget this face and remember my true name.
All I have is a reasoned voice restrained.
Among the rows of books and thought
that were far away as dream.
I have your eyes to see your eyes,
to keep life here, ‘dream of the sky,’
and climb, and climb, and climb,
to find a solitary, untouchable way, that place horizon-level,
the center of this created universe.

Only photographs replace your voice with images;
Grandfather Pines that always stand
over oak and maple, along any ridge you turn your eyes to see.
They stand in rusted shade along umber paths
that trace this land through ridge-pocket rocks of malachite green,
where spring-house waters run creek to creek,
through briar thatch and rabbit bores, on grouse-wing
over each sedge-rung hollow’s hill-side where calls of owls remind me
of the place where you exist, as every night
I hear you, every night, your song rises through the fullness
of three seasons, through coldness of the winter into spring,
in me, your voice, climbs, and climbs, and climbs