The streetlamp above me darkens

after Jon Pineda

for this, I am grateful. This elegy doesn’t want a handful of puffed rice

tossed with mustard oil and chopped chilies, but wants to understand why a firefly

flickers off then on, wants another throatful or three of whiskey. This elegy is trying

hard to understand how we all become corpses, but I’m trying to understand

permanence, because this elegy wants to be a streetlamp dying as suddenly as

a child who, in death, remains a child. Somewhere, there is a man meant for me,

or maybe he is meant merely to fall asleep beside me. Across two oceans, there

is a world in which I thought I could live without grief. There, I watched the hands

of a leper reach with hands made of lace towards a woman who leaned into him.

There, I fingered bolts of satin I never meant to buy. There, no one said her name.

How to look down into the abyss without leaning forward? How to gather the morning’s

flustered shadows into a river? To forget my sister was ever born? Tonight, I will

watch a man I could have loved walk past, hefting another woman’s child. He won’t

look at me. I won’t have wanted him to. This elegy wonders why it’s so hard

to say, I always miss you. Wait, she might have said. But didn’t you want your palms

to be coated in mustard oil? Did you reallywant to forget the damp scent of my grave?