(after PJ Harvey)

I’m trying to see out of my home, wondering if I could ever rebirth

myself onto concrete or sand. The beautiful girls keep digging holes

for treasure and water. Holding my shovel I thought I was smarter.

I could go missing. As if it’s something no one else has done.

Women like me disappear all the time right into their own beds and

every man I’ve ever met has had something to tell me about my safety.

It’s a waste but it’s still a war and it’s hard to keep careful when there’s

a pistol penetrating the topsoil, hands green and wet in the grass.

We’ve found a violence in a woman’s laughter as ripe as the violence

in the rain hitting my bedroom window and so we hold it in our throats.

I’ve learned too much about bodies—we’re ending as soon as we arrive

and in this there’s no reason to run. In this I am as immortal as I am dead.

I want to see an apocalypse on its knees, your steel barrels rust-eaten

and red, just moose and fox left to collect our bones and deliver them

unto the pyre. Let them send us to the sea or the city. Something

has detached inside me and it ricochets. Somehow even in agoraphobia

I am always leaving, in motion with these hills. The first dandelion

of this spring arrives in February and I can’t remember if this is normal.

Under the varnish this is a landscape of fear—the fireflies could catch us

and keep us in ventilated jars. But we don’t know how to breathe anymore

without daily headlines gunshot and gray. It rains so hard I snap awake

at four a.m. as sharp as a kitchen knife, sure the end of the world

has finally come for my tired heart and yours. I know that nightmares 

don’t know how to rest just as I know that someone will fire the shot 

that opens the earth like a big, empty mouth. The children will know

to run but I’ll count shadows—what goes missing never returns whole.

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