A Name for Illness I Knew, but Couldn't Say
        after Jennifer Chang

What if.

                        There is some guarantee
                        of safety—: the light,
                        ordinary & near. The future,

a wind that spans the river as the swans
float by. No winter in sight.
No sorrow. No moon, consumed

                        by prayer. What if where we are
                        headed is nowhere special?
                        Like the herons that strut

through the neighbourhood. Slow.
Nowhere to go. Inevitably, back
the next afternoon. There is no plot in this—

                        it's colder at night than I remember.
                        Tell me, dear sister, where did we part?
                        And how did your body let you

down? Your brain, on fire.
The tumour that made nonsense
of our faces. Face it: the shape

                        & texture of the night doesn't matter.
                        There, the bridge. The cicadas.
                        The forgetting. The starved we we we

wailed by the warbler. Stop me
if I'm wrong. I wanted a future full
of tequila shots & gutrot—all the wrong

                        things. It wasn't until the thin of you
                        was whim & calcium that the herons' need
                        to walk toward any skyline meant

we had lived. And love is like this.
Too much or too little. It's late
now. We'll never be loved right.

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Copyright © 2019 Chelsea Dingman All rights reserved
from Third Coast
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission