Ashes
I lied feathers to the backs of my eyes. I lied the disaster, every crooked breath of the tornado, every miracle gulp of the flood, every nocturnal hurricane. Some birds blew the wind to here and there and a forest called tomorrow. I lied our deaths in a mining accident in the 1890s. I lied the very strings of the corset I wore into the tunnel, the dumb canary whistling its feathers purple. I lied the nested darkness of time. I lied the tadpole in the spring puddle into a bald frog nobody wanted to touch. The frog perched on a gravestone that lied the afternoon gray. You were never very pretty, I lied to my mother. I’d shown up late in a night-ripped dress. I was always in that dress, and you, my husband, you were always lying about the plastic tides. You lied about bears living in your backyard when you were a frantic blond boy flapping your hands at the humid dusk. You lied the gap in your teeth, the scar on your chin, the numbness in your night-feathered fingers. Come down from the sky. There is a toy house. There is a little mouse. I lied the sea motif of this eclipsed room. I lied ten gulls on the telephone wire in front of the house. I lied the neighbor peeping in the kitchen window. Then one morning the light turned into a crow that flew above the house and cawed, and the caw was a frost that tangoed the grass to sleep, and I wore a dress sequined like missing clouds, and none of the tender roses cut my palm.