Those Who Are Here to be Baptized

Wearing our years. If you study the forest, you see families of trees, you see paths everywhere. Light on dewy clover, this too shall be my epitaph.

 

The world opens and suddenly you are allowed to be happy, suddenly you cannot contain yourself. The river flows easily between the banks, and those who are here to be baptized are baptized. Even this sentence is predicated on what happened tens of millions years ago.

 

Memory in reverse. Choosing teams, never again. Father lightning, mother salt.

 

We rode the carousel, it was raining a little, you had about a year left to live and I couldn't handle it, I'm sorry. Miso happy. Jotting down notes on the backs of envelopes, what to buy later, who to call.

I wish we had at least tried to dance. Pine needles everywhere, the summer air redolent, love disappearing at the last picnic ever. Make it a double, and other things I’ve never said.

 

Cauliflower crust pizza, surprisingly delicious. Many of the peacemakers I know are as embedded in conflict as the rest of us, there’s another level we have to reach, and dialogue only gets you so far. Let us no longer ask anyone to die on a hill, not even this one.

 

How scared I am of hunger and other ways I learned to negotiate with witches. Secrets we keep even from ourselves, pretending it couldn’t have gone otherwise.