Umpteenth (After Eden Knight)

In mid-March, her skirts are deserted in a trash dump and she is reduced to a refrain, her name chanted like a rain gutter gurgling its guts out in a flood so thick it suffocates the cement. Her syllables shine like fairy dust and stained glass as they seep into the runoff and rise above the curbs. Crumbling packages of estradiol peel open in the bloated water and dilute before they can expire, disappearing between streams of violet hair dye. The heaps of black garbage bags, full of careless holes, say nothing to the crater in the bedroom wall that is her shadow. Empty silhouettes, they leave no signposts toward her casket, no scaffolding to piece together the possibilities that degrade into white noise. The promotion, the parting kiss and the parting tears, the aging and the grandkids burn within a mirage, unsheltered below the sun. Charring nearby are plastic bottles, a high chair with bite marks and a sunken seat, a pile of rubber bands at their breaking point, white lace meeting spiderwebs halfway, a computer with malware she could’ve removed, and as another truck vomits into the waste, there are crushed beer bottles, a needle stained brown and oozing, an unpaired sneaker stabbed open at the toe, and the swarms of beetles and mosquitoes and gnats that displace with each bag thrown down to cover her up. One could hike through these hills pleading for years, blended into mud, without finding a single thread that belongs to her.