we were promised skulls

 We were promised skulls
but we only found feathers and broken white shells.
Me and you, we stuck to the left
until it was only me that finally stood at the base of the tallest doug fir in the forest
where I felt like that statue of Mary who wept blood,
except it was me who was looking up and worshipping
and I never cry.
We both may have had mother-of-pearl skin,
eyes permanently open to the heavens, palms fused together,
but it was her face that was stained crimson and it’s only my head that’s on fire.

 “Red is a good first color,” I told you.
“That’s what I thought too.”

 Later that night,
there was a flying tree
with gnarled roots dangling hundreds of feet, tickling the ground.
Occasionally through owl holes
we could see into the hollow,
glimpses of liquid gold pouring out
and we swam through honey.

It’s Not a Release

A monster has written my story.
It has given me knees and elbows brown from afternoon romps,
it has let me be happily abandoned
for the wild, deemed lost.
I am enviable.
I am surrounded by giants

and I am losing everybody
all night long, and I don’t see you
during the day and it feels real.

I tether kites to branches for anyone to follow
and they sway and wave, specks
of orange in the sky. Someday
I am going to find someone to break me
open. With my ribcage cracked, your tiny birds
can fly out. 

Until then,
it’s a burying. It’s a squeezing
and a compressing. Then
it’s a collapse. 

I am a sparrow for a mind
and a hummingbird for a soul,
but I need a hawk heart. I dive
into the clearest lake I can find:
at the bottom,
growing like seaweed,
thousand-year-old cedars.
The currents move through the trunks like wind
and I dive between them.
The etchings on my palm map tell me that
this is where
to find one
and I have no one left to trust.