Wakeup

It’s time to talk about the dead girl.

The one you’ve shoved
into a bathroom drawer
among the dental floss and never-used mascara
in the space
where the sharp edges used to be.

The one who sits crooked somewhere
beneath the flowered carpet
that has always sunk
its roots into the bedroom floor.
(Her bedroom floor.) The carpet
that our mother has since replaced
with something blue and earthless.

The dead girl told you
once
about that carpet
that used to be hers.
Sometimes she would lie on it, when
the blankness wedged in her
chest carved away
her steadiness.

She would stare up at her ceiling
with its strange adornments:
the smear of battle-beaten moth.
the air vent that never has blown air, just
a square shaped collection
of dust-choked cracks.

(It was November. A Friday night
the night you found her.
A Saturday
the day you told the first lie that would ever matter.)

More would follow.
You didn’t miss a day
of school
till spring.

And now it’s time to feel her, the dead girl.

(You remember her
don’t you
in the hospital bed.
She was small.
She has always been small.
You stroked her hair, its shortness
devoid of spiked
defiance then, just softened
curls half-flattened
by some ambulance contraption.
You sang to her
of sunshine
low, off-key

but she felt like
she had already turned
to ice
or stone
or gold.)

Let’s talk about the dead girl.

It’s time to unstring her
from the stars
where all the old gods
put the pretty things they’ve broken.

It’s time to plunge your hands
into the silt of some old pond
(you know the one)
smash the toy boats
toy leaves
toy stones.
Hold something brackish, something
round and cold.

It’s time to wake the dead girl.

It’s time to pick her up
so gently
like a bird, or
like an egg, to
place a fluttering,
flickering
form

back into
her breathing shape.

by A.J.