Cassandra de Alba

i wore my boots like she always did &

i plucked a bee off the sidewalk this morning
& she was still dead
i kept clumsily dropping it
on my way to something sweet
& a car full of girls watching me pick it up
for the third time
called me a humanitarian

i took a picture of the new flowers i left it on
& she was still dead
the flowers weren’t there yesterday & how
dare they, showing up to a world without her in it—
but they had been here, only different,
buds waiting to become themselves

i walked past them yesterday & knew
it would be soon,
the idea of the flowers waiting
inside their green bodies

it was like that, too, the idea
of her death—we all knew
what would come—
but still, what a surprise,
when in the morning
all those bright blooms.

let’s go back

take this vending machine ring
with its cracked plastic jewel.

shove it on my dirty finger
like marriage isn’t the punchline
to a joke your mother tells.

let’s run away to the woods—
i have three peanut-butter sandwiches
& seven chapter books.

let’s pretend our parents are as dead
as they will be in a decade.

let’s fall through the floor
of a rotting tree fort.

between us we can almost
light a match, so what
does the world have left
to teach us?

your boots are strong enough
to survive the winter.
my hair is long enough
to hide behind forever.

who could imagine
anything else to need?

a poem in which the phrase “the water rises” has been replaced with a void

you make me feel like a kiddie pool full of googly eyes
i want to spell your name
in blue solo cups
in the cold chainlink of an overpass
and i want to keep replacing them
until [                           ]

i am performing virtue like a child
wearing their mother’s heels
no matter how much i recycle
it won’t matter when [                           ]

the way i live feels very small-marble,
glass-chipped and rolling
around a drain of wet hair

as if anxiety could do to my bones
what heat does to sand

maybe my shoulderblades will fuse
after [                           ]

i am learning not to cry
because it might be a liability when [                           ]

but if we drown as [                           ] i hope
we drown together