I brush my teeth in my mother’s bathroom
as the sun is drowning outside
watching its golden yolk running,
seeping into the seams of the sky through
the reflection of a greasy window
And because, like all living things, it, too, is desperate
for company, I watch as it snatches with invisibly-visible arms
at the dead cells drifting, watch as the freckles
of severed body appear and reappear
in that beautiful decomposing light as if to say, yes,
we are still here, your forgotten corpses, you.
It is easy to forget that, as I inhale, everything
in the air, swimming between my fingers, is dead.
and then I’ll look up at a clipped nail moon embedded
in the sky, our starlit matrix, and, suddenly, some
swift remembrance
and you will lie — DNA ingrained — underneath its
keratin shell, say “I am eternal”
I swallow your breath, breathe in your body whose
leftover memory clings lovingly to my lungs,
say: you are. You are you are you are