To the Real Child Whose Real Parents Named Him: Whiskey

I hope your siblings are named Rum and Tequila
and not Ruth and Timmy
I hope your Mom wasn't trying to name you
after your Dad
I hope the kids in your grade school

had no concept of Whiskey as a noun

I hope you're not related to the baby named Hashtag
I hope you both know you can change your name
I hope you do
I hope you don't

I hope you love your name 

I hope it isn't Bobert Baratheon Catastrophe

I hope it is

I hope you're the first of many

I hope I live long enough to meet

Whiskey Bobert Baratheon Catastrophe the fifth

I hope people never stop asking you if it's ey or y

and when they do, 

I hope you say it's neat with a beer back

To the Real Parents Who Named Their Real Child: Whiskey

I have nothing to say to you.

Nectar

There is an hour in my mind

when we are like Gods

& I sucked nectar from your lips

           Remember?

I swore we’d never be hungry again.

But, now, my stomach rumbles

           Like an oubliette.

A lonely galaxy speckled 

like isolated prairie campfires

we don’t know our neighbors

anymore than we know ourselves

grunting cavemen pointing at their own fingers

& maybe it’s only this festering vacancy           Where God used to beI’ve tried to carve a purpose into it     What purpose can I have without a creator?     What meaning without a beloved?There is an hour in my mind when there was nothing as sweetas the nectar in my tongueor as meaningless               now that I am gone. 

She

She was a soul-renewing

gift from the universe

straight to my

earthbound experience

She was a newly hatched maggot

writhing under my skin

devouring life as she met it

in my most delicate places

She was unimaginable 

pen-to-poet contours deformed shadows

      Of a touch

      Of a whisper

She hurried in like hunger

and stayed like an unbreakable fast

regardless of how I feel, I was never 

      sated.

She snuck in like mist

and lingered like a rolling monsoon

regardless of the dreams I wanted to bloom-

I flooded

She was better from a distance

She was the put of napping kitten

and the mystery of the sound

Slick red nails sliding on slate

and the desperate need for it to end

She was gone before I was ready

and echoed the sound of mostly

never knowing her

at all. 

Sonja

She sees my almost tears

the lightening of letting go

from the dust on the riverbeds

begging to water my cheeks

She asks- will we ever go home again?

I dance with a crooked smile

because it’s easier to chew a cliché 

than a knot you can’t swallow

No, I say. We can’t go home again.

I was raised in paradise 

by two broken parentheses 

strangers came and held the truth of my family

spread open

dissected

An experiment in tragedy

Undigestable.

Sonja said her father touched her

Asking in a tiny voice for me 

to wipe the slate clean

What does untouched feel like?

I try to relate

My sisters were taken away

Incest was exhaust fumes in a car left running

going nowhere

Purposeless. Deadly.

Pulling back skin from innocent bones 

that now only grow

crooked.

What does untouched feel like?

How does safe taste?

Clean isn’t clean without dirty. 

Home isn’t home without homeless.

No, I say. We can’t go home again.