The Gift of Death

It's the opening. We're basking in language itself. The silence of my friend. My love. The one beyond words in her silence.

—Eileen Myles

Lucy, when you waited until we got to the vet’s office to bleed-out on me, and when I thought that your blood was piss or shit pooling in my flip-flop, this was so typical of you, you never whimpered until that last day, your “one bad day” the vet kept repeating in hopes of consoling me

In this totally unsanitary way all I wanted was to mix your blood with mine, keep feeling its warmth on my foot and not wash it off, the memories of the dead being what fuels every revolution inside us, which is to say, it is love that truly accounts for any permanent sense of revolution

I couldn’t contaminate myself enough with what blood was supposed to keep apart, with what the heart and love’s eyes were supposed to index, a repulsion I was never to have in fact felt at a body for that moment an extension of my own, as if you were dying to tell me I was not singular.