As She Became Birds
By
Heather Romero-Kornblum
Maybe you don’t get my new body
The one you almost killed
is gone
I gravitated toward you still
Newly adorned in feathers
Capable of flight!
More economical, physically
I drape myself in beauty
sometimes ashamed
at the hollowing
I still turned you on
though
you hated it
Either you would snuff me out
or I would prove my scaliness
no longer human
cross shrew with crow:
you forgot who I am
I wanted to build a home with you
somewhere in the marshy grass of
the beach
there is a woman still waiting
wedding dress like seaweed;
green was her favorite color
her hair was strings
by the end
arms frozen
back bowed forward from the wind
eyes seared mouth contorted
She must have been screaming
something
when she looked back
I was never your wife;
I was a canvas for your demons
Who will you hate when I'm gone?
If I died, you would
know for certain you would ne’er
taste my breasts again
I survived
a 17-hour
epinephrine
drip
My body
on
liquid lightning
pulsed
alive
I fucked your ghost
I wanted to force you back into
your body,
alight the nerve endings,
trigger the muscle memory
left in our shells
I fucked your ghost to taste
what sight and sound
have stolen
to say your name again
I fucked your ghost because
afraid and alone
I already left this plane
I traversed other realms where I
didn’t lose you
in the most uncanny way
disheveled and hollow,
sometimes it’s easier to believe
you’re dead
I fucked your ghost –
In another version, I made love to
your ghost
tender and connected, I gazed into
your eyes
But the stab of being forgotten is unbearable
I read my grief poems like an exorcism
I take the child I raised with you
to appointments to process
your ghostness
I want to show him pictures of our
life sometimes,
recall moments to honor who you
were –
who we were
Torn between erasing his life and
living in your remains,
I fucked your ghost
I fucked your ghost to leave my
mark
to call you back to your mission
from whatever vessel you boarded
I fucked your ghost to know
that I'm still alive
Sometimes I shed snakeskins
slithering out raw
from a split-open shell;
my next life was in me all along
Write through the insanity, I told myself
there is nothing else left
My words have kept me alive all of these years
A compulsion to be heard,
I crafted around the eggshells
framed and metaphored
to present a palatable dish
This labor of love,
cold-blooded,
has kept me true to myself
through shifting climates,
terrains,
my own alien flexibility
Through the ecdysis,
my core endures
(My
Tears Don’t Make Sense)
I fused glass at an art studio
gluing jagged multicolored shards
tack and shallow slump
bubbling up and out in the kiln
not suitable to eat off of
or drink out of
I am a baby racoon
rejected by my tribe
I wanted to inscribe on your
heart:
Heather was here
When I was dying
I wanted to write my son a letter
so he would get to know me
maybe remember the woman
who took him to playgrounds
and on her delivery routes
The woman he cried for at
preschool during naptime
who made him take swimming lessons
flute lessons
attend soccer camp once
just to try something different
Also the woman who wrote poetry
who painted and crafted
who went back to school when he
was a baby
catapulting from community college
to a PhD student
who learned how to code in her
thirties
who thought it was never too late
for anything
The woman who loved dancing
Puma suede
and crying
Though when she was dying
she was afraid to cry
unsure if it would break her body
more
hasten an undesirable outcome
The thought of orphaning my son
right before his 5th grade
graduation
when I remembered dropping him off
on the first day of
kindergarten –
he told the teacher he wanted to
learn how to write
How do you tell your child they
will
have to grow up without you?
I couldn't
So I lived
Today, I am jerk-
ing off to radical ac-
ceptance. Fuck yeaaaah
Heather Romero-Kornblum
