Velocity

Night Eats the Last of It

13 Night EAtS thE LASt Of it My dead sister’s daughter calls to tell me about her first kiss. Annette’s bones lay in ground an hour away from me, fourteen hours from her daughter. We can’t talk to them. i forget which clothes we buried her in—it didn’t matter. bones never talk back. i remember her cigarettes, arriving at her house as one started a small fire while she slept from sadness on the couch. Or the ones she said she loved and dropped, slack fingered, onto her deathbed when the morphine kicked lovingly in. Cigarettes didn’t matter then. Annette didn’t love roses.today, a boy gave her kissed daughter six; she calls to ask how to save them. Which means she’s asking how to kill, how to force them to lose what she loves— the pure red color, the velvet, the cloying, beautiful smell. there are many kinds of people in the world, but there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who’ve helped a person die and those who haven’t. A book i’m reading tells about a daughter who “still measures events 14 on a child’s scale of fair and unfair.” i hang a rose upside down from Annette’s picture on the wall. this isn’t fair.When i see her daughter, i’ll light a cigarette, watch as her lips breathe a pure burning kiss. ...