On the first day of class the professor asks us whether
the connection between sex and death is transient.
A girl in the back raises her hand, says that making love
always reminds her of the summer her breasts started to spill
out of her blouse, the same way moths burned themselves to death
against the shadow of a lamp they thought was hanging
from a tree branch, when really it was just the reflection
of their own wings being thrown back to them.
The Russians used to believe that reincarnation was the only way
of returning one’s sadness to where it came from,
so they filled terracotta bowls with flour
in the hopes that the ghosts of sorrow would get stuck
in the flour and be baked into the bread.
Even now the yeast of my grandmother tastes like bitter truth.
I said this; the professor wrote my hypothesis on the board
with chalk, his back to me, and I watched his thin shoulder blades
rise up through the skin and thought of airplanes,
of the way their metal wings are capable
of carrying twenty-thousand souls, of cigarettes glowing like candles
for a vigil late at night, of how there are over 103 words for love
yet so many strangers struggle
to come up with even one of them.