Missing Glossary

Autumn, always. The buzz

by which we know the katydid and the fly.

Coral accumulating its slow colonies, the flax

darting bluely through the meadow.

Every evening, the valley is a V

filled with amethyst heat. I was once full of you—

girl who will someday be ghost,

heart that hurts and hurts—

I was once an unscarred peach. But terror

jigsawed my edges until I was sticky as burdock

kernels, clinging to the burlap

legs of every passing catastrophe. Moons ago,

magnolias and jasmine meant swoon,

not imagine a life without them.

Orange weavers didn’t always trail

plumes of their own vanishing through the dusk.

Q is for quiet rooms swelling into disquiet. J

reminds me that by June, the year is already hemi-

sphered, a deflating balloon. My own March

trills somewhere in the field behind me, its song

unraveling. Even you are made of

vanishing, new as you are:

waves of your cells have already died,

xeroxed themselves, and died again. Such magic

yields fewer and fewer miracles. I’ll miss the lamb,

zealously. You. The autumn-blooming sweet pea.