The Black Bird of Chernobyl is Lost, and We Cannot Send it Home.

            In mornings that looked like nights we would sit on rooftops that weren’t our own and talk. They were close together, and bare, bloody feet would lift us for the jump our hands gripped for a lack of safety; we all get out or nobody does. The smoke from the factories was close, and you could smell the cookies the farther west you went, fleeing the late-rising sun, getting warmth from convection as hot air arose. I smelled them before you and you said you wished you could smell and taste what I did and I could see as you saw. If I’d been clever, I would have kissed you casually and smiled as you could taste what I did. I am not and never have been clever or smooth, most especially when it has mattered; just sleep deprived and running for my life from nothing. Not “nothing,” but “Nothing.”

            Nothing will eat you up, chewing enough to break skin but not split bones, spit you like a seed into mediocrity on some street corner where you will wait for the green light to go and get the same lunch every day, and you will never feel shake shingles splinter your feet again, you will never feel like a black, shapeless bird of the night, the Roc, the Zasz, the Garuda, as the world, red-stained by morning, passes untouched below your feet, our hands holding us together and literally above that world. We might fall to some dumpster or our deaths, but I swear to god we won’t fall on that corner.

            Our hands could never come free from that scarlet world, for our nails dug into palms until they were as stained as the ground below, but at least there was a sense we could share where eyes failed and olfactory failed and ears failed and tongues failed, our hands, our nerves came through. We were connected by the same chain that held us to the earth, bound by our truenames to this world, pentagrams around us drawn in the stars, like grains of salt in the sky. They are there to ward off evil spirits; a ring of salt will keep at bay all the demons of hell, but it will keep spirits stuck to the Earth, as well, angels forced to leap over purgatory rooftops with mortals to remember what flying was like, and I hope I was not too much weight to carry with you.

            Caged birds may not sing, but caged chimera do not eat and your hair was like serpents so that I felt like Christ’s disciple holding it when I ran my fingers through it, and your eyes were so independent like a wolf’s I felt as though the world would end in fire all around us so that we were the last two left, daughter of Fenris, son of Loki, when it finally gave in, and you had the bird’s wings of an angel, and if caged Chimera do not eat, caged Angels do not survive.

            You broke that spell and flew above the ring of salt, though, with clean hands and clean clothes, but your feet still bloody and bruised and beautiful, your hair shining from sweat, glistening like the two-headed black serpent I saw when I fell down a hill and could not move, its eyes staring at me, naive and wise, happy and sorrowful, not head-by-head but eye by eye, each one showing a different personality, kind and cruel. Yours had the same emptiness that comes from the cancellation in duality. It is January, and I am the one who cuts you down from the rope. Happy New Year.

            Trotsky’s dead, Strummer’s dead, Allende’s dead, Tolstoy’s dead, Vanzetti’s dead, Goldman’s dead, Toussaint’s dead, Li Bai’s dead, Kerouac’s dead, Ueshiba’s dead, Hemingway’s dead, Basho’s dead, Camus’s dead, You’re dead, and the bones that haven’t washed away will except yours which are so heavy. Did my mortal bones weigh you down this much when we jumped? I cannot see through your eyes, and I don’t know if you can smell and taste as I do, but at least our hands are still joined.