Moving Ruins

after Zoë Keating

i am revisiting a common kestrel eating a bat on the ledge of someone’s bedroom window.

it’s 2010 again and the chat logs are beaming, teeming with conversion of text into conversation.

i missed my appt to infectious diseases, a friend types. so prob gonna die sooner. jsyk

if i go searching for the past, it’s for the absence. all the holes. all the memories unfilled and unfulfilled.

the spotted white bird is kinetic and blurry, though its claws are planted firmly on the bat. just guts and flesh sitting there. moving ruins from the body.

it’s a curse, this not wanting to be eaten alive. this getting up to fall again because you’re already dying.

maybe there’s a reason for self-respect: to contain the overflow. to pick yourself up, so clearly dispersed.

the kestrel was eating a bat fifteen years ago, and fifteen years ago i’d already been a young woman in a would-be grown woman’s house.

she, she. she, like a hush, but hers.

i’ve rubbed my face countless times on my way to becoming. a series of small motions over temples, over hollowed eyes.

come on in, i tell the kestrel. from the past on the ledge to my house where the cello loops with the sinking sun. i will light us a candle.

candles used to melt onto themselves, leaving trails of wax on the pool of older selves.

i whisper in the mangled fragments of ears, mouths: we don’t need to talk about this anymore.

these days, candles burn clean, dripless. they lose shape, collapse, deform.

i have a different life too.

a vessel of heat and light, of aging and grace.

i am also anachronistic.

how goth will it be if i have graves disease, my friend adds. hopefully i have a fatal variant

momentum matters, i think.

people eventually stop thinking about other people.

under the table, my legs are entwined, keeping each other company.

a calf under a calf over a foot over toes.

i’ve sat long enough that the bat is inside the bird now.

it’s enough to make you weep, holding these pieces of a body.