By Rose Zinnia

& I in her—at least, as much as I can with my mouth
a cave like this chanting yuh yuh yuh every now

and again, some humdrum monk—affirming her confessions—
our eyes two pairs of headlights pouring into each other, a starless

oblivion, below and ahead forever—for I too have a face
patina’d thick with loss’s microbiome, too have known addicts

of every degree & desperation, & so can understand her
family—become chosen. She lifts her teal mask

while scraping my enamel of its gunk to make sure
I am hearing her clear. Her eyes crack open like eggs.

I did everything. I could. Her father first, then her little brother,
folded into hushed echoes of their lives, two rot teeth

she couldn’t repair or replace. I still don’t know why
it happened. The stats say two in one family is near

unprecedented. & I swear: her whispering is in the same
timbre my activist friends & I used when we planned

our direct actions against the state, huddled like owls
in a dinky co-op kitchen, feasting on dumpstered melons

with the dog & the pig & the rats & the cats & the squirrel
who we enlisted in the coming (surely, soon) class war.

& maybe this is why we are here together, now, whispering
about taking your own life under the guise of a tooth preening—

there is nary a day I don’t think about my loves & if they will be
here tomorrow. & I too: know shame’s wending & distending

of the body, its chiseled scepter piercing into our thrashing
animal. & I too: have sung surreptitiously into the purple twilit

sweet gums secrets no longer houseable in the little tally
my body makes from the days, built ordinarily of elements,

lest I bloat into shapes I was never meant to stretch into or brave.
In Cleveland, we pulled our bandanas down around our necks—

like she does her mask, now, here—our not-yet-smartphones
wrapped in a blanket outside the room, so the state couldn’t listen

so they couldn’t tell us the world we longed for was not possible:
that our trying would never be enough to fill all this ever-metastasizing

loss. Flossing me she says she keeps a recording of her brother
singing on four different hard drives locked up in two separate safes

so she won’t ever lose his voice again.

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Rose Zinnia (she/they) is an autistic lesbian writer, editor, & designer living in
Cleveland, Ohio. She is the recipient of the 2022 Ninth Letter Literary Award,
the 2022 Vera Meyer Strube Award from the Academy of American Poets, and
the 2021 Kraft-Kinsey Award/Residency from the Kinsey Institute. Her poetry
manuscript, anarchic womb, was a finalist for the 2022 Nightboat Poetry Prize
& a semifinalist for the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.