Gray bands of smoke are still alive.
    CNN revisits ash. I don't resist
    the black remote that
    whispered waking in my ear.
    Picnic benches near the towers
    are shards of limbs.
    Steel we thought we were we weren't.
    First waters of old liberties
    see seaweed strangling a pearl.

    When you died, my sister and I flipped a grimy nickel
    to decide which of our salt-stoned cheeks
    would tackle the stash of memories
    huddled in darkness under your bed.
    I lost.

        Familiar with this fallen moon,
        I ask you point cold blank:
        "Do you drink every night?"
        An answer, the hangnail of silence,
        bleeding color, forming crust.
        Conversation peeling back
        as if it hit pedestrians,

        "Age is a short word for a long sag,"
        she spat. Then sat in still birth sigh,
        an envelope with wetted chin,
        as words just fit because they do,
        twist a stanza to its close.
        Her hair, a thick mosquito net,