As I Fall Asleep

My mother sings from her grave
and my brothers join in, the first time
since the womb they’ve heard her humming
through the bone and muscle of their small worlds.

They turn beneath the soil in tandem, as if twinned
in death, the one born without a chest is there too,
whistling through a thin membrane as if it were
a blade of grass. Then my sister rises up, the earth
clotted in her hair as it was in life, and when
she begins to dance the ground below my feet
shakes, like the time an earthquake reached up
beneath my bed, gargantuan hand, and tugged
so hard I thought I’d fall through.

I haven’t yet fallen through to meet them, though
I hear them calling from the trees like crows,
each with their own voice, braiding as the wind
braids, coils its invisible tendrils around
the branches until they bend and almost
break, those sharp winds barreling down
from the north, a cold so bitter it burns
the skin, beleaguers into welcoming
the slow blood, freezing it cell by cell,
a kind of melody laced in ice, covered
in snow, so deep everything is muffled
into silence, and I can finally hear every
word, every lost breath between them.

Lodi

I slept under the overpass, in summer,
near Lodi, California. I was sixteen.
With my boyfriend. We hitchhiked
up the coast. For no reason. Just to have
something to do. We slept in fields
singing with crickets, in graveyards
beneath tombstones, names erased
by the rain, under the shade of a red
madrone. Some nights we were so tired
we pressed our backs against the shoulder
of the road, woke to a semi jack-knifed
in the middle of the two-lane. It’s good
to look where you’re going, but
we didn’t. We simply followed
the white lines and ended up
where we ended up, restless
in our sleeping bags, or staring out
the window of a stranger’s truck,
listening to country music, counting
bridges. I’m not sure if anything
meant anything to us. We weren’t
going anywhere or running from
anything. We’d look out at the stars,
specks of light we couldn’t imagine
having come from, but I can’t say we
pondered much beyond what we might
scare up for breakfast with our last
few dollars. My mother hated
aimlessness and so I guess that’s what
I was doing. Wandering around as she
said like a chicken with my head cut off.
We found a roadside diner and shared
a plate of pancakes. Nothing bad happened.
I’m not sure when or why we decided
to turn back.