Pinot Noir with notes of anise, apples, and earth
has been injected into the meat of my upper left arm –
a vaccine to prevent viral emotions from attacking
my immune system of frozen numbness to the past.
Because I’ve decided to look.
Frontal cortex, go fuck yourself.

My eyes stare into the blue lit code as eternal as time itself.
In this Google wasteland of searches, I can’t find your obituary.
I find a book you wrote.
It begins with your apology to newborn ears.
I paraphrase:
“I’m sorry I mistakenly drank from the expired carton of white privilege.”

I never expected an apology.
So, I feel no surprise that it is as empty as Jesus’s tomb.
But I do feel the fire burn as my caldron bubbles.

Your apology didn’t mention
your Advanced Course offered to the tell-tale Beauties
who sowed their own lips shut for the privilege of your tutelage.

Your apology didn’t mention
the awkward dance of the Beauties
who Maypoled their way into your Pied Piper’s office
which had a lock.

Your apology didn’t mention
how you breathed in the shame
of the Beauties who lowered their eyes,
looking up through thick lashes,
confessing that they bit the apple of adolescent atrophied-affixation,
attempting to run away from their hell.

Your apology didn’t mention
your worn-out lesson plan
describing the single set of footprints across the beach
which would not be ours.

Your apology didn’t mention
our slip dresses slinking to the sand.

Your apology didn’t mention
the flashlight sun burning into our eyes
as you ripped out our wings from our fucked up faith.

Your apology didn’t mention
your grand theft halo,
attaching my wings to your own scarred, charred shoulders.

Truly, please tell me, I’ve always been so curious,
when you zero to sixtyed from the beach to the sky,
did you see me bleeding out?
Or were you the action hero who swaggers away
from the fiery explosion never looking back?

Your apology didn’t mention the Beauties.

Your apology didn’t mention me.

Since your heist of our youth literally decades have looped by.
But have you recently checked that closet –
the one that looks eerily like an office,
the one with an inexplicable deadbolt on an otherwise innocuous door?
Because our skeletons spiderwebbed in wedding lace
are still propped up against your bookcase of Shakespeare tragedies and Greek epic poems.

I’m bleached-boned and bonded to a past that carries me across the sand.
There always was; there always are just one set of footprints
because I never learned to walk.

But here I am still alive
staring into the blue light which is not the sky.
I decode the honeyed hypocrisy still dripping from your lips.

There is no obituary yet.
But my wings will expire like milk.