We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost but tonight let us not become tragedies. We are not funeral homes with propane tanks in our windows, lookin’ like cemeteries. Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go. Let go. Tonight let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards the razor blades in our pencil tips can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside. Step into this with your airplane parts. Move forward and repeat after me with your heart: “I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.” Make love to me like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did. Go slow. I’m new to this. But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping. I have realized that the moon did not have to be full for us to love it, that we are not tragedies stranded here beneath it, that if my heart really broke every time I fell from love I’d be able to offer you confetti by now. But hearts don’t break, y’all, they bruise and get better. We were never tragedies. We were emergencies. You call 9 – 1 – 1. Tell them I’m having a fantastic time. * Print Flocking from Last American Valentine Anthology He wrote to you with firecracker chalk on a blackboard background from a free-standing landing pad held together by choir claps over buttercups spraying out the mouths of doves. Getting to his point would require starting over at the outer loop of your ripple effect swinging monkey bar style arm over arm parallel to parallel minding the gaps. Sometimes it takes a deeper breath to hover on holy against the current. He wasn’t falling out of love with you. He was falling out of ways to tell you.