Signing Love Notes in My Mother’s Name

“Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”
-from the History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Mornings aren’t the same without your square jaw lit by
a window and California mornings. The B12 has been doing
things to my dreams, dreams where we talk Freud, where I
remind you of your mother and how we share a birthday
with nothing but silence and the sound of your cigarettes.

In these dreams and the houses inside them, the smoke
of this drug or your cigarettes, I let you build a home
against my breast and that fat part of my upper arm.
And even though my bed turned into mud, it is too much
like a heartbeat, like gaining weight, like how nobody

has sex like we can. Tell me about our drive to Birmingham,
how we couldn’t close the window or my mouth, how we always
arrived the wrong day, how we order cake even though I never
eat it. Tell me how you are still a country away, a lifetime
ago, the only person who knows the words I carved inside

the library, that one time you were here and everybody knew
it was us. Tell me about the dream-you, how he is not the boy
I fell in love with, but is always saying that poems are about
death, and sex. And how no matter how much you love me
or tell your therapist I matter, I can depend on you not being

here when I wake up. Because boredom is like bus windows,
the kind you push out during emergencies, the kind that,
like the body, can still move and change, and melt, or shatter
on impact.