At Home Depot 15 Years After Your Death

When you said listen for me did you say angels? -- but I insist to remember it this way, to pin it, thumb tack fighting the crumbling plaster.

You said you would BE and we wouldn’t have to miss you.

You must have known I would believe you.

So at the Home Depot gardening section today, such a late spring, I cannot find the tomatoes, and when I do I’m weirdly upset. I know you would not like them, spindly and diseased. I can hear you.

Is that the way of my work these days conjuring you into existence when even the borders around houses and rocket ships are beginning to slip from our grasp and everyone is leaving the party before they’re asked to?

Mortality, doors shutting behind me, the parent gone who brought me here who willed me, was surprised by my awful first cry, named me startled at my fingers wet and rounding over their knuckle.

Julia Lisella