Morning arrived without choirs or carpenter bees. Instead, a distant howl. Gunshot shuffle. Slammed door. The day shifts with destruction: a scraping of stars & moon. The kitchen is stripped of scent: bacon or coffee or my father’s soap. Most mornings he smelled of oil or oak. Knuckles scraped & scabbed. Once, he sliced off the tip of his thumb & tried to hide the wound with my mother’s embroidered towels. Stood by the yellow sofa & asked if he could borrow my car. Or would I find the sewing kit & spare him a trip to the emergency room. 30 years later I cannot tell you how this story ends. I know we bleached the blood-soaked towels. I didn’t stitch him up.

There was no place to sit. The kitchen was closed. A drunken hippie fell through the glass door & landed at your sober feet. I’ve called & called & called, but you don’t answer. Your phone on silent or lost or flattened beneath the broken back of the man who still hasn’t learned to craft his buzz at the age of 73. The average woman loses 3-5 inches of height in her lifetime due to osteoporosis: significantly more loss than the average man. The Mayo Clinic & Cleveland Clinic & Johns Hopkins agree this is due to smaller bones, menopause & women living longer which feels like the textbook definition of double-edged sword. To lessen the risk, reduce consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, any food that tastes better than kale, arugula, or wheat germ. You left the concert hall in search of some corner of the world that was quiet & solitary & smelled of fresh donuts on Saturday mornings at 3 am when you walked through the alleyway with your friends. None of you will understand Sunday’s lesson: the father, son, & holy ghost. You walk towards sugar: immortal, strong-boned, & hungry.

I’m forever the girl who cannot see fruit flies or dividing cells through the microscope’s lens. The clouds opened this morning: rain & fog waiting like God outside our door. You ask if I see the doe in the red circle of trees: all I see are ghosts. My father patched the roof while we slept. You didn’t hear him when he whispered my name into the damage. An unfolded map by my bed: his fingerprints humming like mitochondria. The doe stumbles & you say her eyes are as sad as yours.

Bad news comes in threes. My Facebook feed is filled with death. Photographs of children who never grew up. Of friends who fell to the garage/bedroom/kitchen floor when faced with fentanyl/heart failure/a stroke so powerful it was given its own name. They’ve all gone from mundane to glorious. I mean it’s the way of the world, isn’t it? Time comes in circular waves. Sunrise rushing towards the dark. The smell of brewing coffee at 5 am is akin to stroking God’s five o’clock shadow. There are moments that transcend the shackles of clocks: the language of parallel lines. It’s that thing & the opposite of that thing all mashed together. It’s the way you dream of trains every night & believe that nobody knows. An algorithm asks if I want to share this memory: my grandson sits on my piano bench & plays a minor-keyed melody by dragging monster trucks across the dusty black stripes: avoiding the dusty white: he says grandma, don’t touch them, they look like ghosts.

I’m learning to rewind but I haven’t perfected the art. I have no interest in the moment of my conception or the moment of my great grandfather’s violent death at the hands of debt collectors. No interest in the comings & goings of the neighborhood dogs in Papillion, Nebraska in 1972. The color of my mother’s shoes as she paced the floor while my fever spiked like a curious cat: no interest in the prayerful spell she cast to save my burning life. I need to recalibrate the time machine I’ve built from the quiet petals of columbine. To return to the moment behind the sliding glass door. I am learning to find the night before the morning disappeared. I’m certain it has something to do with particle physics: vector calculus: quantum computers: transmutational magic disguised as nuclear fission. My fingers on the Ouija board. My murderous fingers wrapped around God’s throat.

Heartbreak is a given in a town where 50% of the population is older than sixty. Nobody knows me. Nobody questions me about the empty crib. I’m free to study the miracle of spontaneous combustion. The mystery of self-immolation. When asked to choose between the brass bed or the rattlesnake: one decides to exit in a bonfire of bougainvillea. A clamoring of the intruder. The thorny ornamental vine: invasive or invited? The sunflower knows the answer. The sunflower is the forgotten thing. So perfectly rising higher to peer inside the empty nest. To cradle the motherless eggs. Sunflower dreams should be discussed more often & with some seriousness or joy or a book of matches in hand. I am nothing but a gargoyle. Watching this mystical choice play out year after year. High priestess of the recently catheterized. My windows are closed against the smoke. The moon, like a blood pressure machine, enters through an unlocked door.