was so bright. It was the color

of pomegranate seeds, of wild strawberries,

of ladybugs in love. It was the color of falling

autumn maple leaves, the part of the sunset

you cannot believe is real. My blood

was the color of the lipstick she left

on my collarbone, the color of her fingernails

dug into my hips, the color of my blushing

when she first told me to feel her up

and I accidentally started unbuttoning

her pants—I do not have a clue

how I managed to live almost four decades

without knowing feel me up means touch my boobs—

but I know it now. I know it now, just like I know my blood

is red, when it’s red, at least partially because of love.

Because of what holds me to the light. What touches me

to the core. What shined me like a ruby and wore me

around her neck. You can die from a broken heart.

I’ve watched it happen. I’ve watched someone’s body

follow a loved one’s body to the other side.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life,

but it was the softest, too, one heart stopping

to tell another heart, I’m coming with you.

You can die from a broken heart,

but the opposite is also true.

LOVE LETTER TO THE TICK THAT GOT ME SICK

Unlike almost anything else,

the tiniest ones are the most dangerous.

The doctor said you were probably no bigger

than a poppy seed when you leapt

from a birch tree and landed triumphant

in the always messy nest of my hair.

A few days later, bloated on my once-good blood,

you likely escaped down the shower drain,

billowed in a sudsy heaven of Suave shampoo

(me having been too much inside of my head

to have noticed you on top of it).

I’d flown home to the woods of Maine

to spend the summer caring

for my eight-month-old niece,

while my still-teenage sister

was a million miles away

in a trailer on the other side of town,

men twice her age offering needles

for her arm so she could sew herself

backward, unmake her own life

one fix at a time. All day

my niece and I would sit beneath the pines

that canopied my parents’ home

that my family had built two years prior

with a second shipment of lumber—

the first shipment stolen in the middle of the night

by a truck big enough to lug an entire home’s

worth of cedar. Had to be an 18-wheeler.

That’s what those drugs will do. Have a sweet kid

steal the roof over her parent’s heads

before it’s even built. In every photo

from that summer, my niece is wearing

a hat. A short-billed train conductor cap

I’d coaxed from the hands of my best friend

when she’d dropped me at the airport in Denver.

Please, I begged. It will help me

not lose my mind.

Each morning, as soon as the sun