Inside forests, under stars and angels, Mary's body held God. We go over to mom's. We put candles on the piano and eat ham and drink wine. I think the strung lights are better than stars and the tree is better than a forest. I think we are angels and the tearing paper is our wings. Then I notice how the room is not paradise so I drink more wine. Even with the lanterns along the driveway, night is outside. Wax stains the piano. Wine spills on the floor. We're not angels and we crash into each other. We all go to Midnight mass. God breathed for the first time. His small bones knocked around the night and he cried. We pray because we are not angels. We hold our hands together and feel the blood tick under our skins, over our bones. God once had tiny baby bones and our bones have never been the same since.

Buddy Buddy Buddy. I love Buddy.

We couldn't find where we parked yesterday so we wandered around the parking lot in the snow. Air fills up the space underneath the sky like boiling milk under its skin. Fingers, breathing, and traffic shake air. But the only thing that shakes up the sky is thunder. You talk all the time. I know that you are banging the air into sounds. But to me, in the space of your talking there is no air and you're making thunder against the congealed sky between us. You say, I'm hot. Where's the car? I love you. And they are all different things. Today it's snowing onto the city. You say I'm hot then you take off your gloves. It's different than I'm looking for the car and it's different than I love you. I know they are different the same way the sky is different than the air and the gloves are different from your hands. But in the spastic shimmer of snowy air, I love you and that is all these things mean.

The world is big. It heaves. The sky latches to it through fire.

I suck the honey out of the still parts of the day.

Mom the hard crack of your heart against the warm air and soft voices opens all the secret noises from the humidity under the swing set. Your mom's dark voice is an idiom for I love you. It sits in your heart with the swing set's grass smells. The sound of your voice deepened for me. The humidity's noises chatter quietly to the strange sound of your new voice. Your new voice that was made for me.

God unhooks the fire that holds the sky to the earth and looks in.

Looking at the sky at night, to keep away vertigo, I think about how wet the air is. Summer is made out of leaves and heat. I taste the air between my teeth.

The tidal ticking of your heart holds the world which holds me--though uneasily. The clatter of your love dropping from the sky makes my clenched heart dream that it can unfurl into something beyond the world. My small heart loves the world but not beyond it. My heart tries to love the oceanic throb of your breath but can only be held by it, dreamily reaching for your voice.

God's gracious. When the night is quiet I feel like I'm crawling through his heart. The crazy woman with the burned face thinks we all crawl like worms. But I know that I crawl like his blood. His heart is cavernous and mysterious. My heart is fat and red. So they're different. I'm both God's blood and the owner of a heart that's different than God. My different unmysterious heart and God's blood. I don't understand this, but on these still nights I sleep in a chamber in God's chest and my sleep feels like perfect love.

You sleep in the crook of bones in my neck. I walk over the crests of you hands. Days slide over me. Old spring, Old fall. I talk but I can't make the words soft enough. I can't make words as soft as the breath underneath. I talk to you but I can't give you all of the breath underneath. Even in my love for you, I keep some of my own breath for myself.

Even if I were not saved I would still love you. This afternoon it was cold and the air between me and everything else was clear. Smoke came out through a building in the city. Damnation is the absence of your love. I float over it. I see the air that holds smoke and water and heat and light and me. I know I love you. It's a rope around my waist. But I'm not sure what the other end's tied to.

I know about the river of joy underneath everything. I know about splashing my feet. I know about wading. I straddle the different floating things of my life, the poorly made life boats. The broken up language. My dry socket need for love. The love that always comes and never satisfies me. The people who scare me. I get distracted. Sometimes I only remember my dryness and the delicate parts of my heart swept up in a mason jar. I remember how things hurt. But now I remember how things feel good. I need to document that. Last night Francis Rose and I were playing cards and we kept cheating. I laughed so hard I slid out of my chair and banged my spine against the edge. My back hurts and my throat is sore today from laughing. I laughed and it untied me from my spine and my rafts for a little bit so I could swim. I laughed and it's a way for me to forget my smells and my chugging thoughts so God can inhabit me and my bones as they slip off the chair. I'm trying to say God, here's my gratitude. You gave us this gift. What do I give back? It's the mystery of thanking someone for beery card playing late spring evenings that smell like trees frothy with tiny white flowers. Thank you.

Creation is all of the parts of the world talking to each other.

Sometimes people say the air is thick with dreams but it's not because dreams are thin, thinner than smoke or summer air, thinner than water. So that's how you can't suffocate on dreams. You can only flash them up onto the walls and ceilings.

When Francis Rose was sixteen she had a poem published in The Queen City Quarterly, a perhaps inappropriately named publication that the Cincinnati library association printed twice a year. It allowed high school students to publish their poetry. Marlene was so proud of her daughter that she copied the poem and included in her Christmas cards. She taped a copy to her shelf lining roll of a journal and wrote an introduction.

This is the Sestina written by the girl whose hands at the time held a dark menstrual smell at night during the summer under the hot honey suckle smell of Cincinnati in a state seamed by a river the color of watery coffee that smells like mud in a country made out of people who speak in bright declarative sentences underlit by a brittle hope in a world that is mostly made out of salty water and the sounds of people speaking in a circling weaving cacophony in a silent universe made out of space and gashes of fire.

God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is that of a niche containing a lamp; the lamp is in glass, the glass like a radiant star: the lamp lit from a blessed tree--an olive tree that is neither of the east nor of the west--the oil would give off light even though no fire had touched it: light upon light. ---The Koran

Marlene found her daughter's baby teeth, dried and rice colored in a baggie. She sat on the floor next to the cabinet. "Kalene" she said to herself. She rocked back and forth, banging her spine against the wall.

Cars make noises. Water falls out of the sink. Bells ring. The radio says I could win a vacation. It's nothing. She's gone. All the sounds mean one thing. She's gone. She's dead. The Ohio river is runny shit that pours into the ocean. The ocean is warm with urine and freckled with dead fish and swollen tampons. The sky is filled with ashes from burned up children and hungry birds and corrosive factory steam.

God--Looking back I can see that for me my love for you seemed to mean me lying down and saying here I am God. I was always ashamed of the parts of myself that didn't lie down. Now, this has happened and all I can do is lie down. I can't leave the bed, or the couch, or the bathtub. I can't do anything. Everything inside of me complies. I surrender. But I hate you. This is not love.