I.
When I look over my shoulder for my friends,
we must resemble the gaps in the bark of a parking lot tree

split open by circumstance, waiting
for collision. Did you know that when they called me

I was in a patch of sunlight
unstitched from a pocket of forest

surrounded by friends and strangers
you would have loved the music

the bass kept striking the air
with a powerful rolling thunder

did you know when they called
I, said yes, I’m still here

and when the speaker of my phone told me
my ears rang with pulsing numbness

this body’s shock
response is a kind of mercy,

only a week before,
you balled up your misery

and pulled it out loose in knotted laughter,
a magic trick so clean in its violence

we missed the blood on your hands
as you palmed the pain

and danced again across Dane’s deck
the way you swung against the world

hair falling in your eyes,
shadowboxing blind, laughing

your fist colliding
with my cheekbone, sending me starburst

and we swing like a hinge
against the door until

the ground took us back
and we curled together in the asphalt-dark grass

and you told me
you felt you were always meant
to go down swinging

II.
In a lost morning, beside a highway
they found you
still, swinging

and how cold you must have been
beside the coastal water
as dawn touched everything and
told the air where
to remember a body as if coming home
and turning on the big light to reveal
the aftermath of the party.

I was still not there
and maybe when I drove back across the island
toward you, I wanted to make the hairpin turn too hard
screaming out the window into the wind

the road becoming a braid around my neck
my memories of you strands of hair
down my shoulders, in my throat, across my eyes
my eyes, the opened part of roadkill
my voice gone coarse as a cracking tree
being swallowed the way all roads swallow
roads have always taken
what the tired leave behind

I remained,
which is not the same as being intact.

*This piece is for E, for Dane, and for Sam.
I’m sorry that I did not know how to do more.