You prefer to eat Chinese food with your fingers and tell me in between bites
about your cousin Danielle who wanted her parents to love her so bad
that she carved the phrase “Living evidence”
into her own skin with an X-Acto knife.
When I was a child I expected morphine any time I got a bruised knee
or a banged-up heart, but was only ever rewarded
with a few swallows of my older brother’s whiskey stash.
John always shot heroin in the bathroom
with his legs drawn up in the tub like a little bird
so my parents wouldn’t hear his moan when he inhaled.
I was always the one in charge
of tucking him into bed after his high was finished,
the weight of our two bodies stumbling through his open door
like a couple who kiss with their mouths closed.
So I ask you whatever happened to Danielle,
because there are over fifty-three different ways to say
lonely and I only know two of them,
the first in French, abandonner tout espoir,
which means abandon all hope,
and the second the sound of your thighs when my tongue
moves like sadness through them.
The Aztec civilization was left in ruins when Hernan Cortez
conquered them in the 1520s, but that does not mean
we, as human beings, are destined for the same fate.
(She pulled up the anchor, you say,
and learned to swim.)