She Showed Up in the Moonlight

I didn't hear your heart stop.

Only the hush that followed.

A year of silence,

like a breath held too long

in the ribs of a locked house.

-

Grief, when buried, becomes architecture.

Every wall hummed with your name,

but I didn't know,

not yet,

that you had left for good.

-

Still, you showed up in the moonlight.

A flash of moonlight behind my eyes,

a palette I hadn't touched

since we last laughed over ashtrays and half-done bleach jobs.

You, in a black and white split dye,

declaring war on your own extinction

and daring the world to blink first.

-

I finally wrote you into the daylight.

It cracked the stillness I had held alone.

One message became a call,

a call became a door,

and behind it, your brother

with arms full of the things you left behind.

-

He's bringing home the art you bled into.

Maybe something you wore,

like the too big jeans that should have swallowed you

but you were too big to swallowed by mere clothing.

He told me that your mother

had bottled your scent

so nobody would forget

how you moved through the room like magic

before your absence did.

-

Even in your absence,

you are a ripple that won't stop moving.

The Wizard is building something

with your name lovingly etched in its bones.

I am sketching poems

and creating art in your palette

where your voice still sings

and your cackle cuts the silence.

-

If there is a Heaven,

I hope it smells like you.

I hope it plays like Bowie

so the broken ones can dance.

-

You were art.

You are art.

And light touches down on the surface

every time we speak your name.