the last interstice

City lights shimmer like pixels over the water,
flicker out in the thin grey dawn. It’s Tuesday morning
and you are dead. My fists hang empty at my sides.
This has nothing to do with love: these are just words,
ballpoint ink on looseleaf, folded in tattered dozens
in a shoebox in your closet, or under your bed.

But it’s too late for words. Kiss me under the stairs
instead, kiss me with lust and loss in our throats.
Kiss my hungry palms, my unworthy mouth.
Kiss me and I’ll unfold for you like a poem, teach you
all of my secrets, sing you all of my songs, only

I will never sing to you again. Listen instead
to the angles of my body, ignorant of your weight
and breath. Listen to my grief, drowned in the shallows,
choked on sand and weeds. Wind across the water. My feet
across cement. An airplane across the ash-white sky.

Every photograph is empty of your face. Every journal,
empty of your name. Cassette tapes of your voice skip
and slip; static fills the gaps. There is no overlap, no archive.
There is only blank space and nothing to fill it, nothing
except my aching hands, your stoppered voice, the fear
of being forgotten. A chasm I cannot cross.

In loving memory of Laini Stamathis, 1978–2007.