to say yes. I believed as a child.
Meaning I feared. Or I loved.
Or stood in the sun braced for those
stupid photos—Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July.

Redact, redact, erase, cross out, tear it up,
let the wind take it. And wind
showers down embers.

That’s sleep, isn’t it? So many

Honest-to-god color, god said, for artists. 
But first, graveyards, to grind the human femur 
in secret, for bone black. And cuttlefish