so i hold a funeral for myself / girl i used to be / cliche sort of thing / there have been so many funerals / i have never been to the ones that matter / what i’m saying is my grandfather died when the first snow fell and i couldn’t go to the funeral / what i’m saying is the funeral was halfway across the world and we didn’t have the money / what i’m saying is attending a funeral is a privilege / what i’m saying is i’m glad i could see myself through all of my past selves because that means i am not dead yet / what i’m saying is thank god I am not dead yet / what i’m saying is i have thought about dying / i have thought about back doors / i have thought about walking into bodies of water and never coming back out / i have thought about overflowing bathtubs and handfuls of pills / never about ropes, though / never about blood / i have to go neatly because i won’t be around to clean up my mess / see, even in a self-imposed death i am still a mess i have to clean up / i have thought about selling out my funeral / i have thought about cremation because by god i don’t want to rot at the bottom of some pit / what i’m saying is i have thought about my grandfather rotting at the bottom of a pit and my grandmother that visits his grave every week and my grandmother that lives alone now and a funeral i never attended / what i’m saying is nothing is fair – not in life and certainly not in death / what i’m saying is thank god i did not make myself into a mess someone else would have to clean up / what i’m saying is i lived to see another first snow of another season and it is cold but i am grateful to feel something pierce my skin that will not bring me to my maker / what i am saying is / grandpa, / regardless of what the other side is / i hope they let you attend your funeral / the only thing i know for certain is / what it means to say goodbye / to your past selves.

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,
once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes
or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station
split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team
gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,
we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups
and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck
with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked
and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf
or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me
slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up
with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,
staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?
Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,
and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body
idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers
open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.

I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree
rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling.
Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled
like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map
pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now.
It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies
and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries,
I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.

On a scrap of paper in the archive is written
I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out
in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,
is without. We scramble in the drought of information
held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face
covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet
under for underlying conditions. Black.
Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck
with the full weight of a man in blue.
Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way
to asphyxiation, to giving up this world,
and then mama, called to, a call
to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say
their names, white silence equals violence,
the violence of again, a militarized police
force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil
unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever
contracts keep us social compel us now
to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out
to repair the future. There’s an umbrella
by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather
that’s here. I say weather but I mean
a form of governing that deals out death
and names it living. I say weather but I mean
a November that won’t be held off. This time
nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm
that’s storming because what’s taken matters.