I bought you with a Groupon and good
intentions: the belief I could kill
loneliness and vanquish ghosts. Instead
I just made new ones, and I was made,
like a pricked thumb, a slip of paper ignited
in your palm. I was alight more than once,
but I count that one time as the whole.
Like the tithe. Like the crucifix.
 
But you are not Calvary, grapevine lashed
to my back. Not Plathian mirror
nor Cliftonian uterus. I want to say
something like bye, girl,* but it’s not simple.
You understand me better than my mother,
though no one knows what you know, and may we never.
“That’s the tragedy,” a friend and I
used to say to each other. She’s gone now too.
 
The land, we know, remembers. Sometimes
the rivers. I’m not sure about the fiber,
the flowering shrub. You might be sentient
enough to carry in your doubled weight
the memory of me and them and then
just me, in all my epic sleeps:
the drunken pinkout, the gray feverskin,
the orange sink of nacho cheese and boredom.
 
When they come for you, they’ll lift a decade
of us through the length of this house
to our unspecified forevers.
 
If any of the mess of me survives the harvest,
the baling and the reconditioning,
may it be how you set my body adrift
on nights it wept from every pore, boxed
in like a fugitive on the highway
of the living, just blinks or a battery charge
away from every love I’ve ever
known. You let me lie still, laugh
in my sleep, lay down
some burdens, scroll,
stream, pick others up.
 
I also dreamed.

—Destiny O. Birdsong

* “bye, girl” is a revised phrase from Lucille Clifton’s “to my last period.”

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A note from the artist: This artwork is part of “Who Cares?”, a traveling exhibition of painted portraits that honors caregivers and their gracious generosity. To bring the conversation to your community, contact PDubroof (at) gmail (dot) com.