One of us is still alive and will prove it.

I think of all the fucking

I would not have done

if my father had lived

and I rush to bury him again.

This time I’m wearing a skirt,

both my hands filled with soil.

I throw it like confetti into the gaping

earth of his grave. Here I am: alive,

daughter of a godly man,

dutiful as an anchor,

I would have married a godly man, too,

to please him who I loved so much

I kept his name,

made it the cleanest part

of what he would have named:

dirty. Ask me where I’m going tonight.

I was a child: unbleeding

in my white cotton.

The seed of what has become all this urgent

want was there when we burned him.

I am like that sometimes: heat

where should be comfort; gone

where should be calm, dead

where one might think my smile belongs.

Sometimes I am synapse:

alive only in connection.

I think of all the bodies

and return to the one I love

most. I am a gift

my father gave to me.

His carcass, a dowry

that I might marry myself

as a nun marries and uses

the idea of a god to justify it.

I am in the bed

alone, on the couch

alone, on the floor

alone. If we are fucking, I am

the only god in the room.