With just enough time and the right amount of

gentleness I think I could forget everything

that drove me away in the first place.

I think I could accidentally forgive it all.

THE SURRENDER THEORY PART II

My heart crawls into bed and asks for advice.

Its ankles are swollen with devotion. There isn’t

anywhere safe to put them down.

If I were younger I would pull the quilt around my

torso, curl my feet into the backs of my thighs.

But grief has taught me a lot about surrender.

I choose to stand in front of the years that ridiculed

my tenderness.

My heart is less creature and more trying her best.

Less sacrifice. More empathy.

I say, don’t bleed for anything that doesn’t stay with

you until morning.

I say, I have no interest in dying for the things I love

anymore.

It’s better just to live for them.

BLESS EVERY PERSON
I HAD TO BE BEFORE
I COULD BE THIS ONE

MY GRANDMOTHER STANDS AT THE END OF THE DRIVEWAY, 2011

after Lyd Havens

Birdseed falls from her hand like rose petals

in a haphazard line connecting the left side of the yard

to the right. If she were to drive anywhere

her Chevy Cruze would roll right over it,

unintentionally plant the seeds into the ground.

A group of pigeons have claimed the abandoned

building across from us and she’s named them

1, 2, 3, and 4. We identify them by how comfortable

they are with our shared presence. 2 will fly up to us

before we’ve even emptied the bag.

3 waits until we’re on the couch, binoculars in hand.

It was with dusty hands that I began to love the coo

of a pigeon, the innocence of its demands.

The dilapidated bones that served as their watchtower

was once a car dealership, owned by my

grandmother’s father, my great grandfather.

Alt Chevrolet. The birds had left by the time I realized

that “Alt” was not the Chevrolet company’s first,

omitted, name, but rather something that every

dealership owner did to mark their territory. I thought

every car with a bowtie on its back-end

rightfully belonged to me. To her.

In photographs of myself, waiting at the bus stop with

a Powerpuff Girls backpack, you can see the cars

parked in neat lines behind me, like

an image dragged across a computer screen

or tire marks on a street, remnants of a driver

bargaining with their brakes.

My grandmother was still alive when they began

building storage units in the place where her father

once sold movement, many years after I found out that

I wasn’t a secret Chevy Heiress.

She said it could be worse which might be

one of the saddest sentences I know.

Memory does not allow me the gift of gradualism.

One day everything is there — the vehicles shiny and

stickered, four pigeons babbling in the driveway, my

grandmother with half of her hair in a pink scrunchie,