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Get Cara Losier Chanoine’s writing in the FREE PDF file 2013 poetry chapbook How a Bullet Behaves				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book How a Bullet Behaves

Letter to Dead Lover

Cara Losier Chanoine

What is morning like where you are?
Does the sunlight split into slabs of citrine,
like the segments of an orange?
Is there horizon?
Is there sky?

Here on earth, I try to harness
what I think you’d miss:
the smell of pine tree sap, the sensation
of warm laundry against skin,
the bellow of the bells in the clock tower.
I send these things to you wrapped
in the paper of my yearning,
but like boomerangs, they always land
at my feet.

Is there something up there that makes you feel
like you felt when you moved with me—when we were one
body, running for the nearest bomb shelter,
trying to escape the force of our own blast?
From your height, our world must look leopard spotted,
with clouds of smoke erupting at uneven intervals
against the canvas of the atmosphere.
You and I were not the only combustibles.
Is there war where you are?
Are there guns?
Are there grenades?

Here on earth, I saw a man grind the head of a pigeon
into pavement with the heel of his spit-shined shoe.
I picked up the body that the pigeon used to wear
and wept. I cradled it against my chest,
and when a passerby cautioned me against disease,
I told her I’d already seen our kind of plague,
and it didn’t come from the body of a bird.

Where you are, do people cradle pigeons?
Do they cradle each other?
Do they take the bones of what someone else has broken
and see something worth saving?
Are there nightmares that hang you with a noose
woven from the fibers of your own regret
and if there are,
who is there to cut you down?

Last night, the noose of my own nightmare
hung me over the wreckage of a junkyard.
You were there, and I asked you
if this was hell. You told me
it was Earth.
I tried to puzzle-piece it back together,
and I asked you if there was hope
where you are
You handed me the broken-bodied pigeon
and as I cradled it,
I could feel its heartbeat begin again,
matching the cadence of my own.

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