Letter to the Unborn
You do not yet live & it is possible you never will. Still
I mow the lawn with your name under tongue, the letters pulsing
together like a maraca of bees. I rub the magic 8 ball of my gut
& pretend I am a mother, but the clouds read better luck
next time. I palm the handle of my hatchet & imagine us deep
in the woods by a body of water so green you could dream up
anything, shaving kindling off the years, making memories
we’re bound to forget. I rest the god of my hand on your neck,
silently show you how to blow a small galaxy of wind
between your fingertips, how to turn thin air into energy.
Our best conversations happen on days like this, summer sun
a mirage of itself. Gasoline on my wrists, wondering if you’ll exist.
Letter to Together Alone
You’re nearly 3 in my mind & I have you on my shoulders
like a Greek myth on a trail by a creek in the mountains.
I haven’t hiked in years & you want to cry but even your acorn
mind understands the job at hand. Your mother’s in England
again & I feel responsibility like a mattress on my face.
Maybe tonight I will share with you the secret of slicing open
a hot dog, lining it with cheese, all the small pleasures
of melt & char & mustard dripping on our knees. I’ll spin
a little early Merle, dance with you on my feet. Together
we will make a call transcontinental, brush our teeth clockwise,
& I’ll dream it was all real with a miniature hand to squeeze.
Letter to the Continental Divide
Watching you surface from the primordial dark into the world
of formaldehyde & gray latex was like watching an octopus
change formation with the blink of its eyelids. You were a wet ball
of red yarn & in that moment I wanted to die while you slept
across my chest. The best feelings are not named & you were a human
feeling light press against your mind for the first time. A perfect
chrysalis, the beginning of knowledge. I held you like a water balloon,
a pinned grenade, the extension cord of your mother who lay there
in the glory & pain of inevitable creation. Dear god please say
you didn’t destroy her body. Say the fallen angel inside her breathing
will find flight once again. You have changed the whole dynamic.
I won’t sleep for years. I will show you with my arms how to cocoon
until a pearl of sun cuts out the moon & you break into a wild blue.
My child, may you too learn to laugh like the trees at midnight.
Letter to Tabula Rasa
The first time I smelled you felt like deleting the weather
channel app & walking shirtless into the rain & laying down
in the tall grass until I was the tall grass. You were a wet plum
in my arms, pale purple & marigold, eyes sideways like lines
of morse. Ok fine, I cried but just a little. Your weightless existence
in a peacock feather filled with ink. I could have thrown you down
the football field of that 4th floor hallway. I could have tucked you
in my jacket & left, driven us to Rhode Island or Jeff City.
When we tied the knot it was 2 becoming 1 or something Jesus
approved, & now we’re 3 or 2 ½ or just a family of clouds
in the eyes of a duck at sunset. Your mother has been sleeping
all week today. That shows trust in us, hold onto it. You
will never be younger than the period on the end of this page.
When you open the Jurassic language of your eyes my world
will change. You’ll have a name, you’ll swallow it whole.
Letter to Infant Baptism
You took a shit on the floor & made a mural on the wall
with your forearms. Some days I wish you were never
born. No moral code outside your own cornucopia brain.
I want to pick up a hot tub & dump it on the animal
of your face. I want to baptize you in the name of fatherly rage.
You laugh soft & insane & those twin dimples beam
like stars from either side of your gaze. You rip
through me like a gun. You open my chest & inscribe
your place. I pick you up & for the next half hour am dead forever.
Letter to the Day Before the Day Before
Today marks the last of the beginning of your life
inside the tire center of your mother’s body.
Today I wear a sailor’s suit & a sailor’s hat &
the mouth of a helium tank. I’ve been practicing this
gig like a Clydesdale in a wedding dress in anticipation
of your naked parade. No matter what you are
I want to call you Jo-Jo & dance with you on my shoulders
on a pogo stick to Mars. I would tackle the ocean
for you. I would spit in the eyes of a buried American
to hear you whimper helpless nettles. You want
a piglet? I’ll purchase the farm. You want a blanket
made out of angels? Consider my globed hands
heaven. Today I am not your father, not an animal
with a human face & a half-blasted job. Today
I am the energy connecting disparate worlds together
by eating vending machine delicacies, rubbing
your precious incubator’s legs & feet, cheering you both
on to Chapter 9: How to Control Never-Ending Light.
There should be a language for the day before the day
before. When stop signs bow low, the streets go holy noir,
when darkness is pure & the air inside a memory
leaks out to create something out of such a loud nothing.
Letter to You from Freud & Pavlov
You’re in love with your mother. That makes 2 of us. Together
we watch the violin of her body shave kernels of gold
off a cob, lather them in butter, salt & pepper the whole fortune
until a slow music floods our eyes. We’re like dogs, sad
& pining, our silence the only language we’ve ever believed
in. I want you to know she is younger than you will ever be.
How her hair nests tropical birds, how the metronome of her
breathing with you on her chest predates time. You will learn
some things about her no one else will ever know. You will forgive
yourself the thoughts of inflicting danger. You will tear us apart
& glue us together & I will never hesitate to look down the hallway
of your mind & fill it with a promise thrown on the floor like a bag of ice.
Letter to Time Unknown
I walk around town looking for interesting stones, river
shrapnel, anything seminatural I can convince you someday
is supernatural. I want to take an arrowhead & carve
the small watermelon of you out of your mother’s belly.
We’re going to kill each other in the kitchen, the hospital,
& it will be your fault. Know this now: I consider you
a threat. But it takes two to tango, kiddo, & a dozen plus
years from now when I receive a call from Officer Horse Breath
about the egged house or knifed truck tires, I will swear
on her life that you were by my side, at home, building a UFO
from little relics found in a shoebox in the garage from time unknown.
Letter to Hindsight in 2020
We played the conception game like we were in the middle
of a hurricane. Ate bananas for dinner, went full bonobo.
We dreamt our tiny apartment was an island, tip-toed around
the lava kitchen tiles, drew a waterfall out of the clawfoot.
There were moments we wanted it all to end. For this to be
our awakening, our silence, an opera with a machine gun
in its mouth. But we wanted you, too, not knowing who you
were: your strawberry pigtails, the microcosmic laugh that can grab
a human heart & rip it like a phonebook in half. We could feel
a presence better than us, finally, until it became us. Your little spit-ups,
toes the size of orange Tic-Tacs, a distraction into another world.
Truth is we might have killed you by imagining you. Some days
now we wake up, hot skin tea-kettling hot skin, & the fire
goes eyeball white, blank as an EKG, the idea of the moment
somehow always greater than the moment the ember floats away.
Letter to not Never but Still
Born. Like a fieldmouse in a shoebox. A buried microphone.
I wrote your name, which finally had a body, with your mother’s leftover
hair along the shower wall. The first & only horror story. I guess
it’s Groundhog Day in October again. Doesn’t matter, but I keep
imagining your first peewee game, your first rabbit costume, your worst
self being entirely forgivable. Now that you finally have a shape
to miss, a dead yawn the size of a single parenthesis, half a marriage.
We’ve been saving our issues for when you left for college or abroad.
Maybe that was the kicker that didn’t kick. Maybe it’s my fault.
I want you to know that your siblings will remember you. They will not
have your name. When I dream these days it’s in television static.
I slap the antennae of my brain & every once in a while a face appears.
I can’t tell if it’s you or the alien of your in-between existence. If the heart
is both verb & noun, you lived a real life. Only time can be forgotten.
