The ex locates my new home and sends a photo

of his fingerprints. A ghost of nicotine in the folds

 

of the envelope. No caption. No note. Only ten

wrinkled, mouthless orphans exposed on a bed

of paper, one edge plucked awry from its spiral bind.

 

The next day, a photo of the crease in his stockbroker

slacks, dollar-flat. And here, a blurry photo

of the alarm clock I bought him as a thank you

 

for the alarm clock he bought me. A photo of arbitrary

minutes—7:10, hollow, starved of sentiment

like a picture of a planet blundered together by molecular

 

collision—a photo snapped by God,

 

who gave the cosmic accident a half glance and thought,

 

 

 

 

I lied to you the last time we spoke.

I said it’s not you, it’s me. But really, it was

God. My pockets clutched

 

glue guns, toggle clamps—an assortment of tools to fix us

when God stalked me on Marion Avenue. Said, You can’t

fix it. Then, I can’t either.                     That morning,

 

my ceiling lamp had ripped from its cord. Even after

I welded the fragments with duct tape, everything

felt cracked—like your five-hundred dollar glasses

 

I smashed that winter—so I thought, if I couldn’t fix that,

what the hell am I doing piecing together

your eyes? Our crumbling

 

kisses? So I didn’t question God. Sometimes, God wants

to be understood. Sometimes, God hates

 

his perfect grammar. His pretty

universe. So he’ll pluck a butterfly of its left wing. Call it

art. He’ll turn from a hurricane. Say, It wasn’t me.

 

If artists were created in his image, how often

does God abandon his mistakes?

 

The day I stopped talking to you, I said

nothing to him, too. I cursed. My entire drive home.

I littered the freeway with fistfuls of tissues

 

while God shuffled his God feet

and pretended not to see.

 

 

 

 

The first time I imagined harming a man,

I was twelve. I imagined that cop

quivering in my fists.

 

He’d paraded my sister and me—disguised as boys—

like two prized rats. Bragged,

We rescued them from their kidnapper, and my mouth

sutured shut. I uncapped

a permanent marker. Scrawled onto my arms, Please help.

 

When our dad ran from California—first on foot, then by bus—

did my sister and I chase him?

Did he drag us out? We left our mom

messages from payphones. Survived on fries.

And the morning he was arrested

outside that Wisconsin hotel, I stitched into my eyelids

 

that image of him clinched in handcuffs, mouthing

assurance from the back of that howling car.

 

Nine years later, at Incheon International Airport,

I don’t recognize him, cloaked in monstrous welts.

How does he know to run to me,

older than Mom was when I was born?

 

I had pretended it was a bus trip across the country—

our first family vacation. How could I know

my dad flushed my hair down that hotel toilet

because every cop—everywhere—was studying my photo?

 

When he’d joked about changing our names, my sister cried.

Did she believe that word? —kidnapper?

 

I should have said, I asked my dad to take me.

I should have said, I promised him

I could be a boy for as long as he needed.

 

 

 

 

But a man who knows the eyes

of the delivery boy better than the eyes of his daughter

is not alive. A man once caged, now

cracked, chapped with pleading

forgiveness from the living

too haunted to visit

his grave—

 

a man once caged, then deported—picked off from his home,

picked off like lint—cannot be alive.

 

It broke me to receive envelope after envelope from the dead.

 

It broke him never to be sure

his envelopes delivered. It breaks a girl

to repress. To shred with her unsent letters.

 

It breaks her to wake each day to a thicker

haunting—the dead crying with desertion.

 

How we dare hate

the dead! How we cripple at having been

left.                  But how much more—how much more

 

crippling to know you are the one

who left—

who left him for dead?