Ely Shipley
I wanted to come back
but the world
didn’t want me.
Your face was a blank
bullet
that still
terrifies
a blanket
that hides a face
erased page
sheet we might
have slept beneath
without touching.
Before I died,
I cradled an infant.
I sang it lull-a-byes.
Aren’t all songs?
But it kept crying.
Its face frightened me,
a fevered balloon
of blood about to burst.
I swaddled it tighter,
rocked it in my arms.
I began to wonder
what it might feel like
to set it down
on the cool metal
of the train tracks
or drop it
from a bridge
and watch its blanket unfurl
wings of seagulls
shatter into a river.
A drop of oil
burning at a center.
I carried it around. My arms
grew tired.
No one else would touch it.
Its face
was becoming skeletal.
It would not eat.
The milk was sour.
We lived
after an apocalypse.
We wandered
our urban desert.
Sometimes, we sat
on a playground swing
and watched the man with stumps
for arms and legs
dance on the sidewalk for food.
I felt ashamed.
It kept on crying.
The rats in the park
swarmed in the black grass.
The sky was starless.
I pulled it closer into my chest.
I muted its hot breath.