You have claws in your mouth now

Stringy algae covers your lungs.

She washes. Missing nowhere, milky, creamy, ashy filth of fresh life drips off. He is the baby. This is the bath water.

Every year my church holds a funeral for Jesus, and we pretend we are eulogists at the funeral. Here’s my eulogy from 2021.

Can I watch a man rise from his seat, sandals dropping one by one into the ground, / As he ascends into the sky?

This dust is not crying, she is dancing. / And the place to which she returns is / the streaks of light you can only see in a moment of deep breath. / Isn't that funny.

Once I heard of a woman who got into her car and drove too fast. She drove through a stoplight but the roads were empty. She tried to drive through a stoplight, hoping the roads would not be empty.

And anyway, she saw it too. / And anyway, she needed a tiny miracle, / and so we saw it, in the purple cloud.

If I could call myself now, the landline would ring three deep tones, rich like dripping lava cake from the microwave, like margarine at room temperature, like a can of Chef Boyardee when it clunks into the silver pot.

A nuclear holocaust in the night sky didn't sound quite so terrible to me, then, if men in my life could just bury their sins under the cross.

Their trick doesn't work on me and I feel proud about it. I think it is better to be outside than in. I feel proud about knowing that. The thing is, you cannot wait on the tarmac under the wheels of the airplanes, they don't let you do that, I don't think. I can imagine myself on the evening news for simply trying to catch some fresh, melting-hot air, waiting on the tarmac.

Silently, the bag writhes on my back. It is struggling. The phone wants air. It is suffocating, I can feel it, straining its neck for the fresh warmth of my hand, my face, my voice speaking into it, anything to give the square box in my backpack the attention it wants.