Lord of the Butterflies

It was so bright

I could feel the freckles

on my 15-year-old face

warming in its glow.

I could feel hope

traveling backward

to find us,

to whisper into our chests,

There will be music for you

one day.

The first time in my life I’d ever rested,

the first time I didn’t have to play a role

I’d never really wanted to get.

That’s the medicine it is

to be finally seen by someone.

I’d crack a smile and you’d point to my chest

and say, What just broke?

but a wise heart told me

it’s the most tender part

of queerness—how we’ve all lost

so much family when we find people

we call family, we’ll do almost anything

to not let go.

I’d loved you since we were 15

playing basketball under the street lights

beside the poorest part of the sea.

The ice storm froze the world outside

into a photograph of the past

while I kneeled down and kissed

my future onto your kneecaps.

on my way to die stopping to tell somebody else not to.

I might never know if he saw me, but I was haunting

the ground, punching my hands into the tornado

of my grief to grab each piece of my own lost mind

so I could get my footing long enough

to clearly ask the air beneath this man

to catch him like a snowflake on the tongue.

A tongue that might also whisper, Sweet sweet soul,

heaven is in the other direction.

Please don’t make gravity play god.

I’ve heard there are fields—acres of lilacs like petalled purple hearts

blooming only to pull us through and all you have to do is holler

your name into a canyon and hear

someone else’s name echo back.

Never in my life did I want more

to keep my blood blue, did I want more to live

than when I looked up and saw myself in someone else

trying to become the sky. I didn’t even know him,

but I know it would have killed me to watch him die

I did, too, my whole world, my whole mind

went home with living proof

of what I’d only before known in theory:

that we are truly not alone in this,

that our veins are absolutely strings

tied to other people’s kites,

that our lives are that connected.

That my butterflies are never gone,

they’re just flying around

in someone else’s belly sometimes.

I pray right now they’re with that stranger,

I pray he’s goosebumped

with a mountain range of joy.

I pray he’s high on the long line rivered across the country

of his open palm held out the window

while driving and singing along

to a stranger’s favorite song he suddenly knows

all the words to but doesn’t know why.

I was sobbing and snaking around my own neck,

when I looked up from the steering wheel

and saw a stranger above me on the overpass—

holding on to the wrong side of the rail with one hand,

his arm was taut as a kite string about to lift his body

into the air and fly

into four rows of traffic.

This stranger and I had the same idea,

but as soon as I saw him, my eyes locked on him

like two screeching red lights that couldn’t stop begging,

STOP STOP STOP STOP.

I was the last car to pass before the fire trucks

and ambulances raced to clot the vein of traffic,

to tourniquet the road, so when the man jumped

his death, his body wouldn’t graveyard

the windshield of someone driving home

with their baby in the backseat. I watched

rescue workers run to try to talk him off the ledge

while I shot out of my car behind the overpass

and started circling in the madness of being a twister

praying for someone else’s sun to not go down,

pacing in the mind mangle of being someone

I know it is its own injury,

spending too much of your life

just holding yourself together—

I’ve known that since the first time

I tried to die: I was too ashamed to go back

and get the stitches out on time so they scarred

as badly as the wound. It’s the one part of me

I never stop thinking ugly—twenty tiny holes

framing a would-be flatline I still can’t look at

without seeing the light going out

in my best friend’s eyes while she watched

the doctor’s needle close the letter

I swore to never send.

The last, and I mean the last time,

I tried to return myself to sender

was a year ago this June.

After five months so sick I was certain

my stomach would never know a butterfly again,

I got so low I had to look up

to see rock bottom, and, ghosted by hope,

I got in my car and started driving toward

a dead end, a cliff that had been my back-up plan

if ever the pain got stronger than I am.

Now I gotta let you know—this is a true story.

On my way to the end that day, I was already mostly gone,

If you have an imaginary friend as an adult,

there’s a good chance you need a whole lot of therapy.

I had been paying my therapist’s mortgage since 2004.

Johnny had dated everyone I have ever loved

I’m fascinated with this idea

of getting high on life. I imagine people

on their backs in lilac fields snorting the lines

the planes leave in the sky, waking

with honeymoons in their bloodstreams.

Me, I often feel like I’m the vaccine

for goosebumps. I can’t remember the last time

someone commented on my sunny disposition.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to juice

the sun for every holy drop.

No one stands by passively

while their joy gets lost in the dark.