The sound of bullfrogs
will never be a part of my nights again.
This is why each evening pours dark visions—of nocturnal plants, of gooey, crimson genitals, of wind blaring against wheat lush—into my sleep.

Carole and Papa are vibrant academics, and they dim by the hour.

The wax on the candle drips. Carole and Papa snore loudly in the next room. The bullfrogs flirt and leap. The moonlight drapes my body in the white robes of ceremony,

And I am again left alone, gazing out at the catalpas, with my sinister imagination. They will go into a rot from which they will not return. Then I will not know them.

My own early deaths were unimaginable embarrassments, so inorganically prolonged and full of desperation that I could not have been more wretched or threadbare by the time the greyhounds finally chased me down to drag me into the pit.

Finally I went gently.

My lives are infants now when I leave them. The losses of them are minor grievances. My skin has only just been cradled before I know I am ready for a new body.

The art is to be prepared for departure.

Not to be a wolf with hackles raised at the strange, dismal figure at the edge of the forest, but the fog in the woods that sits, then gets along when the wind comes.

Carole and Papa taught me it is okay to spill a gallon of milk on the kitchen floor, that trees are altruistic, that I am protected by Baba.

Untethering these truths is a daily crisis. I don’t know how anyone survives it.

I used to think my dream-visions of spider bites, of parrots pecking at my hair, were Baba’s way of showing me that I am evil. Because I bludgeoned the birds. But omens come because I am disturbed, and whether I am good is a dumb thought.

I hope I am left Carole’s collection of clowns and kaleidoscopes, and Papa’s collection of poems, his black briefcase spilling over with editorial papers.

And I dream they will entrust me to burn their ceremonial garments, even though I don’t believe in Baba and religious rituals.

I don’t evade the grim as well as other children.

But I’m glad for people who speak to Baba, whose eyes are closed in sleep, who rest protected against thrashing. I’m glad for Carole and Papa too.

I hope they find their own magic in my disobedience. And I hope, evening after liminal evening, that my imagination is vivid

Enough to make them sweet in the grave.