Like a child seated on the scaffold,

I watched the birds eat their kin.

Blue feathers flew into the sky and 

Created a spacecraft to fly into 

Nothingness. 

Because space is a vacuum, and so

I hid in my grandma’s closet

The old hexes and misery ringing the door bell.

I knew where I had to go, and heard the 

vacuum machine turn on 

If space has no matter, then, 

Is my living room existent? 

Are there no atoms building the curtains

Spiders dangling behind

like the strange earrings that my mother 

would wear while she walked me to the

executioner’s dinner party, a political memory.

Cobwebs swirling behind

electrochemical reactions.

If there are none, then

Is the most infinitesimal quark not

The memory of childhood? 

The wind perches itself upon its 

Headstone, a stair in the sea

Thousands of dead macrophages,

Lap at the lipids of these sands.

Pick them up-

Run them through the tips of your

Hairs,

Tape them to your bible with the old glue from

A forgotten preschool heist,

The doll stores:
They wanted to hear your redness, 

You paradigm of consciousness

With your bible in hand, you devour tomatoes

The auto-da-fe of my own heart

You are space:

You have no matter

You are the vacuum cleaner that I use

To suck up the untouched lakes,

Glaciers, ice cubes in my blood.

And like a child perched

On an owl’s heron 

Watching the mist, bleeding through

Pages and pages of air and 

Empty space. 

A vacuum

The mist, the cargo ships

Red lights in the early eclipse

It rattled softly -

I remember those cries,

I heard them when I first knew that

I would never return to this place.

the sky was streaked with clouds 

like the drunk tears that you shed

In my imagination after 

our red lipstick and 

blue skyscrapers

rubbed pennies at our bank account’s

bellies to scrape off gum and self-importance.

Spoiled children's laughs, reminiscence

Perched upon the curve of the universe - 

a vacuum.