1.

 

You dream you’ve been assigned to care

for a pangolin: spiny anteater, artichoke

 

of gold with bright leaves for scales.

You love the way it spirals into

 

an artful coil at the bottom of your bed,

how it walks upright on its hind feet,

 

its pink and whip-like spaghetti noodle

of a tongue. But then its scales start to

 

fall away (one by one, one by one) before

it simply vanishes: going, going, gone.

 

 

2.

 

Goodbye to the sense of self as scapegoat,

black sheep, troublemaker, and bad seed.

 

Goodbye to being the thorn that abrades the side,

a stinging burr embedded beneath the saddle.

 

Goodbye to being the one who never fails

to disappoint, the swallower of bile,

 

the expired ordnance, the detonation chamber.

When she no longer recognizes you, who

 

will you be? How will you recognize your-

self in the shattering mirror of her face?

 

 

3.

 

Leaving Las Vegas, New Mexico, you

pass the bear sleeping on the highway—

 

a round, brown mound, cheek pressed to asphalt,

claw partially open, trucks whizzing by.

 

By the time you realize the bear isn’t sleeping

it’s disappeared in your rear-view—the ghost

 

malingering, hulking and gloomy, depressed by

the sequined mariachi in Pueblo, uncharmed by

 

the mountain in Alamosa that looks like a face:

upturned, smoking, French-inhaling clouds.

 

 

4.

 

Why is it so hard to know when the last time is

the last time? Your beautiful tortoise-shell cat

 

who became depressed, starved herself to a skeleton

the summer you spent caring for your parents;

 

your father confessing he’d never forgive you

for not letting him drive after the stroke, after

 

the dementia, saying we don’t want to see you before

hanging up the phone; the bewildered ghosts

 

of people stacked in refrigerated trucks. Did any

of them know the last time was the last time?

 

 

5.

 

A disconnected wind phone  in a hilltop garden

overlooking the ocean in Otsuchi, Japan, where

 

tsunami survivors come to talk to their dead.

The rotary dial phone, cracked receiver mended

 

with masking tape, in your parents’ kitchen,

your father’s ashes resting in his chair at the table.

 

One year you were in love with fog, its chilled mists,

sinuous vapors, the delirium of both presence

 

and absence—how you kept obsessively searching

for signs, secret messages in your SPAM filter.