1

In the early winter, the trumpeter swans fed in the fields around the dark city. There were fields and fields of swans landing there. They covered the sky. They covered the land. They stood with broken corn stalks and filled the fields with white before there was snow.
      And one year, there were fewer. And one year later, fewer still. The swans ate lead shot fallen from the sky. And year by year the fields of swans diminished. We carried their bodies from the marshes and laid them in unmarked graves.
      Amelia's hospital bed takes up the living room, which she says is misnamed, opposite. "Let's call it the dying room. The room you die in." And she laughs because she doesn't believe in self pity. Catheters. Bed pans. Home aides. Women in white as solid as pillars. Women in white with square hands.
      There's something I need you to do for me, Chris .
      Honey straws and late afternoon sunlight. She turns her head away. Everything tastes bad.
      For decades, the poison water. My obscene tomatoes drink from it. My solanaceae garden.  Amelia is dying, but I make coffee in the mornings; I tend the garden, write letters to Congress.
      Superfund cleanup sites. Too little, too late. They fence the landfill and cover the dust with plastic and rubber tires. She lost so much weight she modeled her high school prom gown for me. She had been going through things that she wanted to give away. She had kept everything for so long. I finally took it all to Goodwill while she slept. That was last month.
      And then, this morning: Chris, it's time.

    2

Becca, remember, you kept your tomatoes in clay pots on your window sills. You moved them through the day to the sunlight. In the morning, they ate breakfast with us, casting shadows across your marmalade. The wrought iron window panes I loved so much, windows with no screens. I'd imagine living in Italy then, when you murmured your new-learned foreign phrases. We couldn't be further from it. But the high ceilings and arches of your apartment in the city made me think it just the same.
      The EPA says the water isn't hazardous. We measure parts per million and go to city council meetings. Are there acceptable levels of poison?
      Swans feed in the fields but return to the marsh at night.
                  Becca, it's been years, I know, since I've written.
      I imagine you there in the city, a new city apartment, in a new city, one I've never seen. I've covered the walls here with lenses, flash bulbs, antique cameras because photos would break me. I don't want to remember what she looked like before this. I'm afraid it will make me love her less – I'm afraid I'll remember where we were right before the diagnosis. I was in the act of leaving, and I need to remember this woman I'm staying with.
      Here there are always trains. The image of you keeps walking through here with no warning. The tendon that lined your forearm from elbow to wrist, I could taste your pulse. The night you made me listen to La Boheme five times. And you asked me to open my body to you during the last four. In more ways than I can remember. Do you want me? There? And? Tell me, tell me. That half smile of yours when you are concentrating on things other than your mouth, when you didn't want to seem too serious. Folding my body in half, and half again.

    3

I met you the summer your uncle sent you a piece of the Berlin Wall. I said it was just a rock from the road, a poser rock, and you said no, the postage is too outrageous. I still can't get used to saying Russia. You pointed the sharp edge of the rock north, like a compass so you could remember which direction was east. So you could remember borders.
      Our Paris, our New York was a Midwestern city, not even Chicago. Sophistication is relative. For breakfast, you bring a pint of sorbet to the bedroom, spoon it into my mouth. Ice and fruit, I imagine a street vendor, even though all you did was pick it up at the convenience store on the corner. Where cigarettes vie with herbal uppers for truck drivers. You fed me sorbet, you read Neruda to me in Spanish. You only told me the meanings of the lines you loved. Endless newspapers. Red wine and pot, later. It's ironic that you taught me how to stay in one place and not lose my mind. "See it for the first time," you said. "See it again." Endless strip malls become catacombs. Asphalt, the black ether. You watched winter like a white garden, sweet with milk petals.
      Amelia says she wants to see things with love. The beauty in things. It's a different imagination than yours. You wanted to alienate yourself from objects, she wants to connect with them.
      And me? I see shifting molecules when I look too closely. Break it down, break it down again. Take me to the molecular level and one more break will shower Hiroshima. The ghostly outlines of bodies haunting every corner.
      It is a world gone negative, reversed; the afterimage of unimaginable violence.

4

When I think of her, when I remember what it was like before this, I imagine Amelia riding her old bicycle; the old bicycle with the silly plastic basket and plastic flowers. Elias Grumman waves to her, "Helloooo Miss Bennett," he'll say. He always sits out in front of the public housing complex in an old school tablet desk, watching his granddaughter and the other kids, making sure they get on the bus safe. "Hellooo Miss Bennett." The hello long and silly, the Miss Bennett precise.
      I remember the first time we went to the farmers' market together. She bought honey in straws and tipped her head back, giggling as I squeezed the honey into her mouth.
      "Who's you favorite character in Little Women?" she asked me. "Do you think Raskolnikov was wrong? Why do you love Van Gogh?" Tell me. Don't look away.
      I remember us lying in the grass the night of the fireworks, sharing a blanket out in front of the Unitarian Church. The traffic was backed up for miles and we danced in the headlights of the cars together, as the kids with glow sticks chased each other around the church parking lot. And I thought, god, I could never be so happy.

5

People drive antique cars here. At the Elks lodge, there are drive ins. Picnics for antique cars and their owners. You would love the old trucks, with their blunt beds. You would love the cheap hotdogs. You would bring me balloons.
      Acceptable levels of carcinogens.
      I'm edging to the edge. Ridiculous. There are no edges in the Midwest. This is not New York. This is not even Montana with its restless itinerants and mechanical bulls and gas station casinos. Safe as houses. Safer than suburbs.
      In weathered wood barns, in barns advertising mail pouch tobacco, country alchemists are making a new poison. The kids call it Cat. They don't know about Khat, the drooling green leaves between rotting teeth. No, this is battery acid, lye, bleach, a good dose of ephedrine. It's amazingly versatile. You can shoot it, snort it, smoke it, and if you cook it up wrong, the barn burns down. A barn burning. The girls at the 7-11 on Pigeon Hill smoke Cat.
      Amelia's friends file through the living room, bringing tofu casserole, Chinese herbs to quall nausea. I brood. I hate them. I've always got a goddamn pot of chamomile brewing. The day she found out her body would kill her, had been the day I was going to leave. It's not that I didn't love her. Oh, I did. I did. It's just that the Midwest was pressing inwards. I felt dead, I felt like nothing was going to change, and that everything was over and I had to get away.  I was going to call you. See if you'd ever figured out how to love all of those faces of god. That's what you said you wanted. You wouldn't allow yourself safety, you wouldn't allow yourself comfort. I never knew anyone so ascetic in their promiscuity. You hated that you couldn't love them. You tried. And when I left you, you pursued me across seven state lines.

6

Sunset. Amelia sleeps. I'm sitting in the living room, writing this letter. I sleep with her when I can, or at least I lie next to her and hold her. I'm afraid to sleep in her bed here. I don't want to wake her because sleep is the only time she seems to really relax. So I just try to stay still and watch her breathe.
      I will burn these pages. I will burn. All of this. Really, what is love anyway? Desire? Need? Violence? These days I spend at her side while the women in white hold heaven above us?
      Amelia in her summer dresses.
      The tomatoes, in their cunning, spiral out of the cages I placed to contain them. And I'm looking at that line, between loving Amelia and failing her. You said you'd love me now. And now again. But not forever. Just now. It's all we have anyway, you said.
      Amelia. Amelia.

  7

The first time you returned to me with another woman on your skin, you thought I was happy. You can home, exhilarated, but tentative, but defiant. And you thought I was unmoved. You found me amidst the broken everything, caught in a moment of grace. I never told you, but this is what happened in the space between when you left and when you returned:
      I paced the house. You drove to her apartment. I piled all of the plates we had bought together on the porch. She opened her door. I stacked the glasses, our mismatched yard sale menagerie, next to the plates. You couldn't wait to kiss her. I unscrewed every   light bulb in the house, set them next to the plates and the glasses. She was younger than you, and so I knew you'd press her wrists to the wall, slide your knee between her thighs. She's pinned and moans in your mouth when you kiss her. I hurl the plates against the concrete block back of the garage. By the time you give her what she wants, I'm hurling the glasses, calling you a cunt, a bitch, a raging asshole. The neighbors would not approve, but they are too far away to hear. Your houses are always the distance of screaming unheard.
      I get too close to the wall and pieces of glass fly back at me. I don't notice my arms speckled with blood. You'll notice, but it will be later.
      Now, you bite down, now you lower her to the floor, now you hold fluttering wetness in your mouth. All that is left to break are the light bulbs, which burst into the air. Dusty fireworks, clouds of moths, papery glass slivers, shimmering birch bark, trembling filaments.
                  There is nothing left to break except her, and you do it and do it again.
      But for a perfect shatter of a light bulb, I would have left you then. But there it was — the curve of it, an eggshell, a feather, a cupped palm. The shape of it stunned me. It curled concave on cobalt glass, one of your favorite plates. And I imagined a lake, which was the eye of the earth, and a woman stepping out of a swan suit. A stray curved feather floating on water. I collected all of the shards of the bulbs and began to layer them, gluing piece by piece. A glass swan suit.
      So when you came home, you shook your head at me, in the debris, laughing. "My artist," you said.
      I held up the shape of a wing to you, wordless. All I could think of was beauty, beauty. Fragile beauty.
      You asked: "Did you have to break all of the plates?"
      I said, "Do you know that the one thing computer graphics can't imitate are the flying patterns of a flock of birds?"
      You brought me Wonder Woman band aids and watched me make wings. Later, in the middle of the night, you made dinner for me by candle light. We ate from the pan. You asked: "Did you have to break all of the bulbs?"
      "Yes," I told you. "Yes, I did."

8

In 1958 the corporation began dumping PCBs into the town's sewer system and defective capacitors into the dumps. The Lemon Lane landfill on Pigeon Hill contained 650,000 cubic yards of contaminated waste. Kids played around the dump back in the 70s. My Amelia, even then seduced by the form which would shape her life, made mud pies and castles by a creek that now has warning signs. They say there is no causal effect, despite above normal levels of brain cancer and melanoma in corporation employees. Above normal levels.
      The sullen tomatoes are just this side of poison. They are bursting fecundity, lolling in the sun and drinking, drinking. How many parts per billion? "The residents near Lemon Lane claim high rates of birth defects and cancer but levels are consistent with EPA regulations." Claim. What does claim mean? Well, you know, Pigeon Hill is poor. Of course it's the drugs, or their bad diets, those people.
      When the corporation proposed to build an incinerator to destroy the waste and consequently release it into the air, the landowners downwind came together and sued them. Property value speaks louder than protest signs. The train trestle on Pigeon Hill is painted with the bars of Stardust. Hoagie Carmichael wrote that song here.
      People live by the train tracks. There are blue tarp lean-tos, camp stoves, beer cans and litter. On the fourth of July a homeless guy sits on a table in the park and shoots bottle rockets into the morning sky. You can't see color; you can only hear the whistle and the bang.

9

Maybe I didn't love Amelia enough. I never loved her the way I loved you. But I never hated her the way I hated you.
      We drove across North Dakota, past steel Atlas and his brothers, all holding up phone wire and the sky. And the sunflower fields, the thousand eyes watching us pass. That woman you seduced in Montana, the night I stayed in the motel and you went to the cowboy bar to ride a mechanical bull. If I'd had the money, I would have left you then. You knew what you signed on for. And I did and we drove in silence until we reached Missoula.
      That night in Montana. The night when we got to Missoula, where it only took you moments with my body to make me beg for you, for more of you than I'd ever had. Tell me. Here? Your half-smile. Your fingers, your fist, your tongue, you were ruthless with every point of entry. Tell me. When you spread yourself over my lips, the taste so sweet, and then death. You knew what you were signing on for.
      You said marriage was death. A negotiation, a bargaining. You never accepted tenure, although you earned it easily. You said each woman was a new face of god. But you never loved any of them. When you said lust, you whispered it and ached for a woman gone. In my bed, you asked for the luscious bitter of my need. You chanted, love, love, love. But under your skin you always said no.
      I chose something simpler. Marriage, as close as two women can get to that. We've drawn up papers, signed releases, made our living wills. Remember Haiku. You hated rings, syllable counts. Your windows had no screens. You brought me empty vases. I wanted lilies, nasturtium, gladiolas, dahlias. You filled the vases with water and set them in sunlight. You said possibility cannot be dried and pressed into albums.

10

What I miss most are your letters.
      I'm lying, of course. What I miss most is a life without form. Insistent traveling. Road food, gas stations at midnight. How you said the sunflowers were watching us pass. All those eyes shifting in the sun. But I would imagine them bending their faces to your brilliance. The pulsing green throats, longing for your touch. They didn't know you would snap them with impunity. Without thought.
                  Becca, you know what I was like before David died. I refused medication because even though the lows were hell, the highs made up for it. My body is impossibly healthy, despite cigarettes, the coffee, the whiskey then. The nights you had to force me to come to bed. Days without sleep. You wanted to know what it was like. It was like being able to see molecules moving. Break it down. Break everything down. Past names and bodies and blood to the pulsing, shining, spinning molecules. I thought this was how artists were supposed to live; wild euphoria. A romantic notion, I know.
      I'm lying, of course. What I miss most is the taste of you. The poison. With your clinical detachment you inoculated me first. Tell me, this? Are you sure? Just enough to call forth an immune response. To increase tolerance.
      Did you know that yew trees can live forever but their sap is poisonous? Sometimes I wonder how people came to know these things. Someone, somewhere, maybe 1,000 times different people, a woman maybe, longing for texture, forefinger caressing a bleeding tree. A taste. I squeezed the honey into her mouth. How much will kill? What is the acceptable level? Above normal?

11

We were all afraid of nuclear war, when what we should have been afraid of was nuclear waste. Radiation sickness. Chernobyl. No fallout shelter protects you from this. You can hide under your school desk. But there is asbestos in the walls, chemicals pouring into the sky from concrete towers, PCBs from the factory up river.  What is in the water, the dirt, the air. Modes of transmission. Vectors. What is the greater violence? The blast or the poison that you ingest every day?
      Becca, there are things we do in life that change us irrevocably. Things that leave indelible marks on the soul, twists that change how we move in the world. Think of the injury that didn't heal right. The body compensates, muscles contract and lengthen, we change our stride, and forget we ever moved any other way.
      My mother was only 47 when she died. No one called it suicide. I drove miles of off highway road. I drove miles of granite fences. Alone. You couldn't come. You were working, you said.
      You weren't working. She was from Peru and told you the myths of the Quechua. She told you the myths of the Quechua had no happy endings. You imagined Machu Pichu. You breathed dawn at the gateway of the sun. You tasted her; the crook between forearm and bicep, the hollow beneath her sternum, of course you thought of coca tea. I'm cynical. You weren't fucking her because she was different. You weren't fucking her because you had a vacancy in the United Nations of your conquests. No, you were fucking her because if there's one thing you were always terrified of it was death. The idea that the glimmering, glowing, fucking brilliance of you would disappear someday. Admit it now for me. And I'll still love you, the way I always have.
      When I came back, you cracked jokes, you were all distraction. You took no lovers for months.
      David was my prerogative. The one I'd never taken before. But I took it then. Nights unending. I've always hated the smell of men, but it didn't matter. I had lost anything approaching sense. I'd lost my senses. A delirium of shattered glass. Our mosaics we couldn't stop building. You'd sit on the couch, and we'd collapse in front of you, naked and glistening. Daring you for once. You couldn't go here. You'd never give it up for a man.
      I did it to hurt you.

12

You once consented to meet my mother, before she died. You sat with a loaded paper plate, awkwardly, your knees pressed together, your lower legs a triangle with the ground. It was spring. I pushed my five-year-old cousin on the swing set. Petals, Bradford pear, swirling ivory tumbleweeds. We were in the wind's way and the petals stuck to our hair and shoulders. Later, you would find one still in my hair and trace my skin with it. Nothing more. You were still resentful of the twin bed in the basement of my mother's house in Vermont. But you watched me push the swing to Annabelle's giggled demands. Higher! Higher! My mother watched me too, and I could tell she was thinking I should be a mother by then. You're so good with children. You are thinking something entirely different.
      "You looked like a Norman Rockwell painting," you said later, pressing the stray petal to the hollow of my naked back. It was almost a snarl. "You mother was imagining grandchildren." I was 27 then. My mother would be disappointed. I guess Amelia and I could have had children, but it never seemed to be the time. I met her so late. After the first cancer. After you.
      When I was young, I never thought about kids. You know, that was back in the 80s, when it seemed like lesbians were outlaws of a kind. You don't have kids when you're living on the lam. It was only a way other people could hurt you, threaten you. You just don't think about it. And then, when everything changed, in the great lesbian baby boom of the 90s, you and I laughed at the couples with kids.
      Anchors. Chains , you said. Things to tie us to the earth.
      But Becca, sometimes I think that's part of what love is, a kind of tie to the world. Can you really live in the world and not be tied to it somehow? We floated somewhere on the surface of things, thinking we were moving deeply through it all.

13

"The hands are the hardest," Amelia tells me. "You'd think it would be faces, but it's not."
      She's holding a small sculpture, one she did when she was younger, before she abandoned bodies altogether. There is a small collection I find in a box in the attic. I bring it to her bed in the living room.
      It's a lucid day and she smiles when I pull all the people and animals out of the box and place them on her white blanket.
      "Did you read about that dig in China?" Amelia asks me. "Where they found a whole life-sized terra cotta army?"
      I remember pictures from Time magazine or maybe National Geographic. Figures on horses rising from the earth, bows drawn. Like the bodies of Pompeii, only fiercer.
      "When I was little, I would make clay people and try to breathe into their mouths, the way the Bible said God did," she says with a wry look at the lumpy people.
      "Blasphemer," I say and gallop a clay horse over the hills of her raised knees.
      "Well, it didn't occur to me that only God could do that. I mean, I thought the thing was breath, any breath. Like CPR or something."
      She takes the horse from me and I pick up a clay dog and bark at her hands.
      "That's Rhino," she tells me. "Our first dog."
      "Why Rhino?" The dog is not fat, he's skinnier than most.
      "No, it was Hippo. We'd drop him into the lake when he was a puppy and he'd wade in up to his chest but go no further." She takes a deep breath and lays the horse on its side. "I'm tired."
      Her clay menagerie gallops and cavorts across the blanket. If I close my eyes just part way, I can imagine them rising out of the earth, her clay army guarding her.
      I think of glass wings, made from broken light. I wonder if they will melt in the sun. The giraffe's neck is ropey and Hippo chases a penguin. I watch her breathe.

14

What do we learn from Icarus? To deconstruct: if the son is too ambitions, feels too much joy in flying, does not stay equidistant from the water and sky, there can only be death. The wise father flies to safety. Another maze. Don't look back. Don't eat the seeds of the pomegranate Do not deliver fire to mortals. Do not make love with gods in any guise.
      You will fall into the sea. You will sink into the underworld. Your liver will feed vultures. You will transform.
      Red, red juice in your mouth. The blood of god.
      Let's call it passion. But this is just the thing: in every story, we are taught to fear change. We are taught to fear pain. But would you rather be Icarus? For moments to know the joy of touching the chariot of the sky? Maybe the melting wings are not the punishment. Maybe we are reading it all wrong. Stasis is unnatural. Death is change. I'm being simplistic, but maybe Icarus had it right. Maybe our caution keeps us still.
      Six seeds are never enough.
      Let's read it that way. My greatest fear is that I will never now the kind of joy in life that Amelia knows. That I'll never enjoy life and this constant depression will stop me from fucking gods and flying too high.
      Nights I've crawled into Amelia's bed and held her. I should be doing it now. Holding her last breaths, because morning is coming too soon.
      I should tell you I miss you. I miss David. And my mother. Loss is insidious. My mother used to call on Sundays, when the rates were low. After, even years after, when the phone rings on Sunday, there's a peripheral part of my mind that thinks, "Oh, it's probably Mom." And then I remember she's gone. Not every time. Just still. And you. Some mornings I'd wake up and imagine your windows. There will be a fly in the room and I'll think, Becca has left the windows open again. And then remember.
      Did you know that the actual translation of the 5th commandment is thou shall not murder, not thou shall not kill?
      Amelia is asleep now. It's best when she is asleep. I can watch her face the way I did when we first met. When we first. I know, Amelia, what you look like when you are dreaming. I know your face the moment before you wake up. The startling glow of your opening eyes. Waiting. Amelia.
      The women in white put cans of protein shake in the refrigerator. Amelia hates the texture of these shakes. She always likes salty things best.

  15

Amelia. Her old lady name. Anything but fragile. Long and wiry, a broad mouth, her father's eyes. We met at the Judy Chicago talk at the university. Amelia loved her plates. I was staring at the plates on the walls and she was standing next to me, a stranger. She said: "Sometimes I dream I'm spinning plates like these. With one of those white sticks. I'm always afraid I'll break them all." I was so focused on the plate, it took me a moment to register what she had said. Spinning plates, and I thought first of spinning thread. And then I turned and pictured her balancing wide plates. She looked like she could do it easily. Her large square hands and muscled forearms.
      "I'd like to see that," I said.
      Yesterday, she said: "I was so afraid of you, then. I was afraid you wouldn't stay. And god, I wanted you so much."
      "I used to dream this dream about you. You walk into my workshop, and crawl into the lit kiln. And when you step out, you were pure color. Always ochre at first, then yellow, then a delicious green. And you touch my pieces and they change color. Like you are a kind of Midas. When you touched me, in the dream, it was like becoming a kaleidoscope, colors just kind of spinning around me."
      What Amelia threw away:

- Her high school yearbook
- Her high school and college diplomas.
- Tax returns. Amelia is religious about holding on to seven years of tax returns, but she saves only the last two years. "You might need these." I am the executor of her estate.
- Dresses, dresses collapsing on the pile. Jump in colored leaves. The red strapless sheath she wore just once to get my attention. The gypsy skirts. I've never been good at describing clothing for women. It's a foreign language. The types of collars – scalloped, plunging, Peter Pan.
- Her collection of donkeys she stacked on the mantel because they make her laugh. "The ears. Just look at them." She'll laugh and make a peace sign on the top of her head, wiggle her fingers at me.

18

Old Ellie Kinser threw a rock through the church window yesterday during a big revival. She told the police she did it because the preacher told a young girl that she'd been raped because of the short skirt she wore. The girl killed herself last week. Ellie stood in the rain in her house dress and crossed her arms when the congregation emerged. She walked up to the pastor and spit in his face, then walked away. I wish I'd seen that. Did you know that in Indiana, molesting a child is a Class D felony, unless it's your own child, then it's only a misdemeanor. Justice.
      Bruce Davis runs the tattoo studio at the place where the train tracks intersect. I wonder if the house shakes when the trains pass. I wonder if his hands shake.
      Murder is an intimate act. Stopping the breath. Introducing poison. Invasion of a knife, a bullet. Contact. Call it killing then. Mercy? What does mercy mean? To stop pain before it becomes too much? I want her to live. I want to breathe for her. But this isn't what she's asked me to do. Helloooo Miss Bennett. There's something I need you to do for me, Chris. Honey straws and late afternoon sunlight in the dying room. She turns her head away. Everything tastes bad. My mother's funeral back east. Miles of off highway road, granite fences. All the things I had to sign. Survived by.
      There are no swans here. The fields are white with snow in winter. The grass edged with frost. In early spring, the red bud trees hint at purple right when you think you can't bear another day of the winter.                      

17

Our last night. I knew I'd have to leave you. There were no glass wings to save me. You said: "Don't look away."
      I couldn't work anymore. The only image was you. Your too-long throat, your thin lips. The rhythm of your curled fingers inside me.
      I fled the dark city where we lived. As west as we could be without standing on ocean. It was impossibly dark there. The slate shores, purple starfish. We were both starved for sunlight. This is what it was like, the last time we were lovers:
      Palm open the veil. Stand on the proscenium, close enough to see sweating grease paint on our faces. Don't look away. Fluorescent lights in a low end department store. Washed out.
      Tell me, you said.
      Nothing, I said.
      It should have been something dramatic. I should have been tied to a chair while you fucked my best friend in front of me. We should have been wildly sober. You should have been cold. But there was nothing left, nothing we hadn't done to hurt each other, and I loved you still. I knew what I signed on for.
      Here? You asked.
      No, I said.
      Our bodies without color. Kicked away sheets coiled at the foot of the bed. A glass of white on the bed side table, monochrome newspapers read and wrinkled on the floor. Our sex toys, your iron bracelets and chains. Your silicone cock still wet from my cunt.
                  We were glitter. We were glistening. We were kaleidoscopic. It was an exorcism. The breath of god left our blood.   And then we were nothing.
      Nothing happened, Becca. Sometimes a tornado will touch down, rip a half of a house from its pilings. And in the next room, the one still on the ground, an empty vase will remain standing, untouched. I don't which side of the house I stood in. The one whirling through the sky alone to some technicolor world. Or the one completely still. Because I felt both things. This complete stillness. And this whirling need to destroy.
      You know, we never had tornados that far west. I only remember the wind bent cypress trees and the nights of endless rain. The propane stove flickering fake fire behind reinforced glass. My piece with the light bulb wings had earned me a showing in New York, which then landed me here in a large Midwestern university. I would not refuse tenure. You pointed the rock from the Berlin Wall north and headed to Alaska.

18

I don't believe in hell.
      Amelia wears glass wings and I wonder if they will melt when she reaches the sky.
      "Chris, it's time," Amelia says.
      "Please. One more night," I say. "Please."
      The women in white stand back to back and see no evil. There should be no question of their involvement in this. The afterimage of morning sun on Amelia's bed, white sheets, on the back of my eyelids. She sighs and squeezes her morphine pump and closes her eyes. "In the morning, then." She takes another breath.
      It's late, almost three a.m. I dread morning. Chris, it's time.
      I don't know what she will be dreaming. What if it's kaleidoscopes and colors? A little girl shaping clay? Maybe it's endless nightmare.

19

I wrote you a letter to tell you that I still love you. More importantly, you are essential to the figures and pieces I put together and take apart. Fractures, all the fractures and rejoinings. You. Your imagined body, the loss of you informing every color. I don't know why it's like this. Indelible you. But this is a different kind of love than I have for Amelia.
      I would say the way I've loved her is better. I would say that love is a child trying to breathe life into lumpy clay dogs who will never swim. But today I have no answers. Amelia. Amelia.
      I hear the whistle and the bang and see no color. Six seeds are never enough.
      And morning comes.