………………YOU ARE THE WE OF ME………………

Out to kill myself,
a dead woman’s spirit
was following me closely behind,
ready to take this body as soon
as I left.

Her warmth reached me
and my body went numb.
Her name was Caroline.
She came from under a garden
she used to water for a living.
“Leave” she said, aggressively,
trying to force me out.

Prayers gave me little comfort,
she squeezed the air out of my lungs.
Poor Caroline, I thought,
she needs me.
“I will help you” I said,
feeling her forcefulness was grief.

Later that day I regretted my offer.
“that’s not the way,” I wrote,
and with that piece of paper
I lit the oven’s flame.

Some things come back.
Looking for you,
your death screams in your forehead and crackles.

Mother told you
that feeling all that evil inside is a symptom.
You know of what.
It is a green and blue dead person
you carry.
A negative of the picture
your six-year-old mind took
of his face next to yours,
his body on yours.
It is him you carry within.

You are afraid of the blackness.
But some nights you wish that he
would come alive again in a dream.
You’d receive him with a knife on your night table
for your use
or his.

At four I unlock my door. Across the hall, John’s is already open. We take our clothes off in front of one another, and when we are naked, John jumps from his room to mine. But today I tell him, softly, so as not to wake the others, that I want to go out earlier, to catch the sun coming out.
Outside we are not alone. We cannot see the horizon; we are in the middle of a pine forest and light is beginning to filter through the trunks of the trees. I look at the wet dirt underneath my feet and vomit a yellow substance, like jelly about to lose its consistency. One of the elder Buddhist teachers kneels down to pick it up on a plate.
The teacher returns with two yellow balls as big as his hands. They seem to be made of candle-wax rests that look like my vomit. In one of them there is a bone, a shrunk femur. Another teacher joins and observes the spheres. “What is it?” I ask. “Your evil,” I hear. One of them says it. “Evil?” I squeeze John’s hand. I want to kiss him but don’t, because we are not supposed to touch one another until we leave.

It’s a hot night.
I’m sitting waiting for a train,
while a part of me hits another
against the walls of my body.

Evil—I feel it rising in my mind.
All my thoughts are about to be overcome
by an enormous meanness,
a meanness that will take my body and throw it
in front of a train or a car.

I try to remember good things.
Nothing comes
the church I attended when I was in third grade
and my conversations with God return.

The skinny nun who used to listen
to my stories with her eyes closed
also comes back. And my friend Lore.
What about her? Only her face.

I hold them three strongly
I tell myself this is it.