schism

I can feel the night
through the crack my window makes,
a schism between where I am
and where I could be
like a cool, black horizon—
just as intangible,
yet a little more reachable
like the cracks the sidewalk makes
over which I leap and tiptoe,
careful not to break my mother’s back,
or my own neck.

I could feel the night
when you breathed on my neck,
words that surrounded me
like motes of dust, or lust
tinged with the moon’s syrup coating
and a smell of dampening grass.

We laid your pages out on the floor, next to mine,
like a dealer displays his goods, or words—
thinking carefully about which clauses
we wanted to hurt us
(just a little) not enough.

And we could feel the night
rob us of day’s lucidity
as you injected my elegy,
shoulders slackened,
and I blew this powdery poem
through that opening, blackened—
a schism between where I was
and where I could be.