I brush my teeth in my mother’s bathroom

as the sun is drowning outside

watching its golden yolk running,

seeping into the seams of the sky through

the reflection of a greasy window

And because, like all living things, it, too, is desperate

for company, I watch as it snatches with invisibly-visible arms

at the dead cells drifting, watch as the freckles

of severed body appear and reappear

in that beautiful decomposing light as if to say, yes,

we are still here, your forgotten corpses, you.

It is easy to forget that, as I inhale, everything

in the air, swimming between my fingers, is dead.

and then I’ll look up at a clipped nail moon embedded

in the sky, our starlit matrix, and, suddenly, some

swift remembrance

and you will lie — DNA ingrained — underneath its

keratin shell, say “I am eternal”

I swallow your breath, breathe in your body whose

leftover memory clings lovingly to my lungs,

say: you are. You are you are you are

Published in the winter 2025 issue of The Stonefence Review, Dartmouth College's student-run literary magazine.