Two Birds At Low Tide, Grieving
by Christine C. Rivero-Guisinga

each carried

a story of broken wings

a memory of storms

When someone says 
nothing is permanent,
I kiss them 
for a year 
to prove them right
slowly, sweetly.

A metal comb slides
through wet black hair,

steel teeth dragging
translucent lice,

their sticky eggs
dripping from each strand

like lanterns in trees
tilting in the wind.  

Every third breath
the blue kazoo
of her breathing  

would show that 
the quiet two
weren’t her leaving.

Some lives fall apart in the bar of an airport
Chili’s. They do. Some lives outrun
their endings, or love themselves
into the earth like a glee-stricken worm.
Grief-stricken is what I wanted to say.
The arrivals gate always streaked
with canned-air wafts of sadness: she is crouched
like a lantern. Moths squint in his throat.
We think we are dolls with halos but we are mud
in such shining cellophane.

Hooked over my ears,
my father's beard. 
It hangs just as gray. 

on the windowsill opposite to my house
a crow looks

at his loot—straws, stalks, petals rose as
rat tongues...

soon, he will measure each of them in the
vernier caliper

of his beak; they will slip through his nib
when he tries to

carry them along with the hazelnut—this
he knows

I submerge in water with a body of mud. I emerge, light
–weight. Burning brightly. Red as clay. I sing a moth into a light 

bulb. And the moon falls asleep. I’m naked in my mortal hunger. 
I stay awake learning how fire gobbles up wood to perfect light.

I wonder if the stars wither because they’re planted in vapour &
dust. When the lantern’s eye runs out of oil, we gather fireflies to light

it up. Once, in the laboratory, I seethed a sample of night in a kettle 
& hoped that its darkness evaporated. Once, I found a plethora of light

rays emitting from a dirge. It led me into a dark house. There, grandpa 
stood before a concave mirror but the image formed was a candle light.

I went into a chapel
but didn’t speak to jesus
I tried my luck with buddha
but found no spark between us
I looked up scientology
it all seemed very odd
I poured myself a glass of wine
and Oh my fucking God!

I sleep like a man ashamed
of his own reflection.
Each morning, the mirror
names me foreign.
O Lord, let me wake
in a place that loves
my skin, my sound &
my shadow. Let me be
a boy, not a threat.
Make me a dream they can’t shoot.

What I know is once your mother pushed 

& now she cannot hold you.

What I believe is hands are the real windows

fogged by what breathes in us, who we keep. 

What I want to know is, lost 

in her house as her body 

led her nowhere, did you house her

hands in yours? There, there, 

you know, are no doors.

He dusts my nipples
as though they are piano keys. 
As though he has never heard 
Rachmaninoff’s Prelude
Opus 23, No. 5 
in G minor. 
Hard notes. Marcato.
Poco meno mosso.
Harder.