October, broken

If not the density of fruitflies in the kitchen, then the fragility of ice fractals

lacing the window. If not the mouse

whispering in the drywall, then the bat circling the attic,

unable to sense the markable midnight breeze.

If not a dream where we are looking at purple wildflowers,

then waking up to the first snow on my tomato plants, some

of them unpicked, still green.

The mind then softly considering your grave— touched by the first snow, now

and touched forever.

At night you join me.

We climb giant trunks of trees and sit in the audience of a never ending

outdoor piazza. I ask you how it is to be gone, and you laugh at me,

wearing double denim. I bring a bag of small green onions and coconut water

to your parents doorstep, then I realize I left the wrong bag, the one with half-rotten

apples covered in ants. I bike away, but

the streets are all upside-down. If not the nonsense of the sleep-mind,

then the depravity of the real asphault, unchanged.

Tonight I will fall asleep

rehearsing your voice in my memory, making

a figment of you reassure me. At your burial

I placed some flowers on your dead ankles. And I

moved your dead body with a dead sheet.

You died again then, and every morning

you die a little more. We buried you, but it wasn’t exactly

you that we buried. You are all over town, overrunning my mind,

weeds in the wind, some Debussy prelude overhead.

The longer you are gone,

the more things happen. In France, bald men dig for truffles.

Up in the Oaxacan moutains, old women carry large bundles of clothes

on their backs to the launderías. In this dumb little town

I boil ginger root and sit on the carpet filling a giant canvas

with my mothers garden— squash vines stretching all across the floor.

I think of you in the paintbrush zinnias, in the hillside trees

and the expanse of skyscrapers from the yellow cab. I feel you

in the big moon, which you always thought was up to

something malevolent. Now free

from the oppression of light,

beneath dirt on dirt on flowers on pine boughs on rocks

on dirt— the shell of the body becomes

what it was always meant to become. Bones and bones

to energy, energy bending upwards to mushroom spores

some small green shoots come spring.

Rena Medow is the author of "I Have Been Packing This Suitcase All My Life" by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her writings and illustrations can be found in The Vancouver Sun, LunaLunaMagazine and VICE. She is spending her quarantine cataloguing books at an old tobacco warehouse turned bookstore, and teaching her foster kitten how not to cry. You can send her unsolicited cat pics on Instagram at @rena.issance_