bridges collapse and highway exits burn.
three hundred miles of razor wire / glass /
salt. i call home at two a.m. and only the silence
picks up. i’m the afterimage drifting between
satellite-steel and sparking landlines, rootless
and smoke-throated. maybe our street flooded
with every high tide storm, but the rising waters
still were not the first to swallow us. sister-mine,
what rooftop hymns did the heartless sparrows
sing on the last morning? springtime cruelty
undoes us every time. the sky loves us like
a death wish. we make promises on the falling
telescopes: one more year, one more candle
to extinguish, one more goodbye, and another,
and another.