Push uphill Read a dead letter Hope for silence Maybe one better Keep calm When the bad news arrives Keep calm When it’s written outright Lose calm When realization comes Waste the whole night Find new life Closing in around Overwhelmed with detail Come unbound Keep calm When the bad news arrives Keep calm When it’s written outright Lose calm When realization comes Drive the whole night

My mom’s brother passed away when I was eight years old His death was sudden and cruel, from an undetected cancer We flew out to Virginia for the funeral Barely two weeks after he went to the doctor Three cousins left without their father, the oldest barely ten My sister and I sat around with them and played with toys Every so often one of them would comprehend what was happening And erupt into emotions and actions I couldn’t understand And the scariest thing I ever saw was him In a box Where they placed him at the end of it all Standing there, a little kid alone with a corpse Telling him I wished I had appreciated him more In my early teens, my family witnessed a motorcycle accident We were on our way up the coast of Door County A weekend picking cherries and eating ice cream She wiped out a few minutes ahead of us on a winding road By the time we approached there were people at her side Someone had picked up the bike and moved it to the shoulder The rider had a helmet, which probably saved her And the world paused right there to make sure she was okay But the scariest thing I ever saw was her On the ground Where I briefly, truly thought she was dead Where they told her it was best for her to stay still And it was clear to me I wouldn’t forget [interlude] And the scariest thing I ever saw was you In a room Where they took you when you wanted to die Learning I couldn’t always be stronger in support Than you were in collapse And it feels selfish to even tell this story from my perspective But I’m still learning, and you’re still here, and that’s a start

It always seemed inevitable that the little house was doomed Vines cascading over its face, garbage bins permanently pushed up against the front door Cream-colored metal siding on the raised main floor warped and pitted A lonely leftover of its kind, neighbors replaced by newer buildings many times over Nobody left to care for what was left there The very last man to live here left reminders of himself LB made crude metal cutouts in whimsical shapes of rockets and planets Affixed to the tall front fence by barbed wire; he was afraid of his surroundings But he held onto the house until he physically couldn’t, and it sat empty when he left Nobody left to care for what he left there On a Friday in the fall, the inevitable fulfilled A decade after vacancy and seven months after LB died, His little house left us, too. One of the oldest in the city; It was too far gone. Crews came to wreck it as soon as they had a demolition permit Nobody left to care for what was left there I came by to pay my respects, to a man I’d never met and the home he inhabited, both subsumed The little house a pile of rubble: ornate rotting wood window frames, tin siding, asbestos I took some tools with me, hoping to save LB’s rockets and planets from the fence Couldn’t get them off, fused onto barbed wire by rust, I took a brick from the pile and headed home Nobody left to care for what I left there

The clouds explode and then the desert blooms Someone will need to mop this floor for me When I emerge, I find my car Like a cathedral in a dream of the future Drive 'til the rain stops Keep driving Pull over and blast off when I get the chance Clear as an insect's wings in the sunlight Flip on the high stakes radio Try to sing the words right Drive 'til the rain stops Keep driving I had his arms tied up behind him We were together all day Maybe make Culiacán by sunset Try to, anyway High as the clouds now Flying Drive 'til the rain stops Keep driving