my first fall, i was seven. not when reddened leaves take flight and kiss pre-cooled ground but myself, discovering the limits of windows’ openness, found a new identity in an approximation of birds and insects. a moment of freefall, two hours of hospital, six weeks of casts on both arms. an unscheduled departure from my room. the hospital’s waiting room was a relic of the dark ages, complete with a screen showing moving pictures, some child’s drawings dancing in forgotten space recreated in the distance but i was unable to look away. it held my focus and i knew i would always remember that vision. artificial things against a glass of lies, the reason i lose endlessly. why did you climb out the window? i thought i could fly? no. i thought i could fall and run. but i didn’t think that, did i? even at seven, i wasn’t that stupid, not a silly child pretending to merge with winged creatures but seeking safety at any cost. i hadn’t expected the pain. i hadn’t expected it to hurt so little. i thought it would be worse but in my delusion i still knew i couldn’t try again the next night or i may not bounce but be buried next to that tree. they tell me time doesn’t wait but it teaches patience. and that night i tasted freedom from him. i fell. i’m sorry.

but i’m not as sorry as that. a little, if only to myself for sacrificing my body to the safety of the mind or the pain of the mind to the safety of the rest of the body. my arms healed yet minds never do. six weeks of temporary refuge pretended to be my prize for silence in the face of questions. does this hurt? it was years before i realized they asked everyone, even the grown ones, if they hurt. i imagined they could see through my face and read what is written behind tearless eyes. i thought i was saving him. i was. but i had no idea what i was saving him from.

you love me, don’t you? if you don’t help me, i will die and you will be alone, beloved one. i would like to say i didn’t believe it, that i went along in hope of an escape, that i was too smart. i knew my times tables. i could read about hobbits and wizards and broomsticks, with or without their escapist overtones and stakes of burning at the hands of fearful bishops. but until that moment when lies danced across glass reflections in that hospital, i simply lacked the artifice within. and i believed he did, too. certainly it hurt. midnights of pressure and torn self amid blood but it was normal, expected and without the treatment every night from me he would certainly die and i would be alone. mother had no choice but to leave and he would be forced to do the same and i would die here in this room watching birds through twinned windows.

she stole a piece of me and ran. but you can save me. but it must be secret. she is waiting for me to die to steal you away. i understood what alone meant. i could taste the abandonment. but i had no memory of her, of mother, not a single image in my head of what other children described, what i saw in the school playground at the end of the day as i was collected. grown ones with long hair and smiles. i smiled back and they would wave, would hug sometimes. they would talk to me but he would never do more than half a smile. for my protection. he told me they were dangerous, that mothers were a tribe, they could lure me away, steal me from him and give me back to my mother, that if i even spoke such words i would be taken away and locked up, kept from other children and he would die.

the days were regular. mornings of fruit and cereal and running for the bus, laughter and screams and noise that i longed to imitate but couldn’t find within myself for reasons i had not yet uncovered. days of pointless discussions of ones and twos and threes and why mammal babies drink milk and what happens to salt when the water dries and leaves it behind. the secret crystals reflected nights that i wondered how the other children survived and still screamed and jumped and yelled in excitement at the end of the day. i was the broken one. i hated saving him. i couldn’t forgive myself. i didn’t stop, of course. he was worth saving but i knew the others were better at it, didn’t hate their fathers for what they had to do to keep them alive. i hated myself. i begrudged him my body yet he had given me so much and this was all he needed in return.

the next fall was the day before my fourteenth birthday. it wasn’t before, this time. it was after. nearly four in the morning as i sat on my bed listening to music wondering. i was still a child. i was starting to wonder what was wrong with him that could be saved by my actions but i had no real knowledge, no way to figure it out. of course i’ll tell you when you’re ready but i don’t want to hurt you. it’s not a secret, not like the treatment, but knowledge is dangerous and i’ll keep you safe from it. but knowledge is what everyone desires. i read books. i asked questions. miss, what kills you that you need treatment every night to keep you alive? many things. why do you want to know? is someone you love dying? no. what a strange child. but i found answers. i found enough answers to convince me i knew the truth. i read far too many things i didn’t understand for a moment but they hinted at the power of genetics, the importance of family donors to save you from the horrors hiding in the blood, the daily therapies they never described, at least not to children. never to children. to save us from the reality of knowing instead of the reality of doing. my blood for his blood so he wouldn’t die. he thanked me every night. i don’t know when that began. before i knew what the words meant, though, without doubt.

i loved him but i couldn’t stay. i read a story that morning about a kidnapped child tying one end of a blanket to the bed and climbing down from an upstairs window. it sounded like an awful idea but i had a blanket and an upstairs window of my own. i don’t know why i tried. i made it nearly half way to the ground before i heard ripping and reached out to catch the bottom of the window ledge. i missed. but a fourteen-year-old is less padded, less bouncy than a seven-year-old. i tried not to scream but a broken ankle will do that and a repetition of my left arm from seven years before, wrapped in plaster. it was her who found me screaming my head off in the garden, propped up against the bottom of the tree. living next door. shit, what were you thinking? why didn’t you just use the door? but it was locked. locked? oh, right. i forgot your night terrors. but i don’t have night terrors. not the kind in dreams, at least. i’m a liar. i make up stories. he made sure they knew that about me. i pretended i had been hurt when i was little, that it happened every night. i asked her if i was supposed to hurt so much. but he knew. i was six and all little ones make up stories. the shocked laughter was perfect. i imagine she regrets it now.

i can’t tell you when i realized the truth. it was always there to see and i had hidden my face from it. at six, at seven i believed him. i searched for a cure without knowing his disease, knowing i was keeping him alive every night and berating myself for wishing there was another way, owing him more than my body but being asked only for that. but time passed. time, the teacher. i couldn’t say a word. everyone knew i was a liar, that i had made up traumatic stories so i could get away from him and go back to my mother. lies. like that my mother wasn’t an addict, that she hadn’t really run away, that she was the reason the tree in the garden grew so well, not from her pruning and weeding but from the nutrients within her beneath its roots, trapped by him as much as i had ever been and more. i can’t even tell you when he realized i knew. not for a long time. but where once i gave in, now i was resigned but fought back each night. the pain wasn’t worse. it was just different. as i grew, it was easier. as i learned, it was harder. same him, different night.

the last fall, though, dear future love, was his. not in years past but three hours ago. i’m not sure if there will be a dawn or if the combination of his evil and mine will turn the world into permanent night. i am beginning to see a break in the clouds but it may be wishful thinking. i know you won’t come soon enough to save me but perhaps if i survive this you will search for me. the knife wasn’t sharp. cutting bread has always been a chore but it hid within my sleeve. the heat of late summer gave way to his fall as metal parted throat from throat and surprise drove him through the openness onto a ground awaiting another gift from above. that soil that had witnessed three arms and beyond shattered at its embrace now added a spine to its tally without more than a gasp.

i was downstairs and there was a noise and i came up and saw someone running. they pushed me and i fell and there was all this blood and — don’t look. you don’t need to look. come home with me. but i look and the smiles i had pretended for years were no longer there on my face. i will miss him. he loved me. one last lie, just what’s expected from me, the child who makes up stories.

Liquid imaginings metamorphose
Toward incipit dewdrops
Encapsulating mornings’ revelations
Of rebirth
While death waits

Wings unfolded
Preparing to extricate you
From unfinished sentences

Making thoughts complete
In their very shatterednesses
Left hanging on winds
Fluttering partially remembered flags
Of homelands once dreamed of

You walk between trees
No longer in the rows
Your mind expects
But dancing freely
In slowed emotions

Legs carry you without grounds’ touch
Between branches hung with moist leaves
Droplets microcosms of memories’ departed
Landing beneath your gaze
Feet feeling only wings of unexpected fluidity

Eyes deceive
While contacts once firm
Lose perceived solidity
In daydreams of postponed mortality

Seeking ideas behind their shadowy forms ends hope amid concepts of rage for beauties’ sake

Forgone conclusions of broken ice floating predictably on waters frighteningly lacking in depth

Call effortlessly to footsteps seeking new pathways toward welcoming drowning deaths

Scream into the silence of stimulus with voices for ages muffled by pretended lust

Walk over dunes of dried existence to locate a self not simply forgotten but bereft of past

Eventual falling takes refuge in predictive dreams of illiteracy faced with understanding

Knowing is the enemy of pleasure when happiness is the pressure on skin

Eyes never before opened shiver before moonlights’ pale form and wake into discarded blindness by degrees

Nothingness tastes of honey to lips knowing only the incense of passion brought on winds of proximity

Yet creation becomes your momentary lover

Forget once tasted realities’ trinkets lodged in darkness’ unhomed histories and write lyrics of yesterdays’ provisioned improvisations

Touch tomorrows’ insensate reflections with liberal doses of deletion and untried verse while truths’ ideals perish at pyres of self-compassion and the suicide of grief itself no longer with tear atop horizons’ lost realms of misunderstanding

Seek sanctuaries’ bitter embraces of judgment within unfaithful deconstructions of hope

Transform wind to body’s echoes of unspoken scriptures stolen from dreamed wishes of desires artificial

Gather leaves shaken from lives’ plum trees amid quieted storms’ haze and plant them within molten fields from earth’s depths to grow welcome nothings in shadowed realms

Walk near waters’ calm embrace as hourglasses’ unthinking sands speak through footsteps

Dreams of notes unreachable for humans sing without meaning through leaves stripped from branches now bare of context.

Forests confuse complex shapes within lines never straight and wavering curves of meaninglessness

Loosely remembered pain of ended loves mingles with past lives once thought sweet praised for their bitterness

Taste nothing but tomorrows’ unforgiving slowness while apprehension consumes a lack of sensation

Listen within winds’ all but lost for images not possible without the conduit of sleep to bring them out of hibernation

Yet hear it for brief moments

When gaze settles on horizons of shimmering false presence

Only slightly out of step with your internal rhythm no fear appears in you until late is overtaken by imminent impossibilities

Contact drives your mind to flight yet legs obey nothing of adrenaline’s desired safety and grounded is transformed from yogic enterprise to shadowed agony

Awake more from terror’s scent than torn experience you taste warmed words between blooded teeth

Imagination awaits tonight’s rewriting in softened rays of dawn’s disbelief while escape becomes an unknown amid newly bitter walls

Distrust arrives unbidden with singularity of action become symbol of unspeakable negatives

Positives not expected beneath lust’s implacable privilege

Possibilities future quickly degrade to past’s night failures of dreams unbidden

Woken thoughts sleep behind clouds of expectation

Sanctuary comes too late

In sensory wildernesses known melds with rewritten in histories unremembered yet unconsciously echoed into endless tomorrows

Your skin shimmers disbelievingly as written lies unlined from what it absorbed on your path yet tasting freely of moments’ delights between winds of courage once possessed

The literature within screams dialog at created partners in unfulfilled crimes while response silences itself in shadows of preprogrammed fear and taught idleness

In you the world becomes yet recognizes not itself

You hear voices between circumspect glances and quiet them beneath the shrill consonants you imagine into being

Brief encounters surpass all but desire’s performative drama and supplant permanence in all but simulated laziness’ acted wokenness

Encapsulated snowflakes penetrate through arias of forced unenlightenment amid mists of intrinsic hallucinations building separation fences from fear of authentic engagement

Dissimulation is become expectations’ accepted measure of success where single-track minds become deities to unthinking masses

Delusion no longer traps but frees you when mirrors are what you fear most

Better live in moons’ tacit light
than risk the shock of mornings’
staggering revelation
that tomorrow comes not
before today’s engagement

Yet you look not to horizons
seeking enlightenment
or press vision toward walls
to find yourself
in minds’ simplified depths

Amid black dresses and
hidden behind beauties’
foregone conclusions of ineptitude
you seek predictable failure
for others

In your disengagement
you escape to safeties innumerable
in their concert
with friendships forged through
a connection of intoxicated familiarity

You know not thoughts of those you touch
beyond their spoken normalcies
and shared programmed losses
to penetrated insides
turned submissive in their predictability

No freedom to dismiss inaction
as busywork in service of unwelcome national identity

You are a good drunken girl

Lost to the needs of the moment

Self only in naming your next drink

Dawns’ haze simply dissipates with stimulants’ unquestioned necessities in sunshines’ absences in caves of self-sustaining bed obsessions

Reflective exportations denuded of difference discover kittens’ poses and revolutionarily sexed humor burdened with moralities’ absence as rite of passage

Compiled of regrets collected as childhood badges once sewed in pride now worn in memories divided between trauma and adulthoods’ requirement of failure as membership

You revel in decisions made behind the guise of drunken unthinking not as excuse but entertainment being the stick whereby self is measured in forests of victimized conquest

You speak of those dismissed amid loves’ afterward hatred in terms of animal lust and passionate attempts at disinterest while seeking tonight’s targeted pillowed tzar

Next morning brings hopes of narratives embellished by submission and memories’ threads of coyness rewrite themselves as unexpected error

Overridden by evening’s mating dance awaiting