I packed my mom in Tupperware
from the dollar store. She always wanted
to go to the Bahamas, even before
she'd gone to sand—before her bones
could be mistaken for broken
shells. I don't know if it's bad
to divide ashes, leave a slice
of femur in the Caribbean foam,
a chip of coccyx in Oregon waterfalls
gushing like overdue orgasms.
How does a person want to be
after our skin's burned to crisps,
the only organ capable
of holding all our worst messes
together? She never said but I felt
her wailing through my insides
demanding turquoise waters, a cleanse,
a starting over. But then again,
who's surprised? She was always so thirsty.

We were sure we wouldn't live to thirty, to hell
with whether we wanted to or not. Rosalind hung
herself a week after her brother wove
his own noose. Two Catholic funerals
in two weeks was more suffocating
than the sick collecting
above their kicked-out chairs. We all
would have bene twenty-eight,
but Sheri left a decade before, spine snapped
underneath a four-wheeler in a plowed
down field. She should have been in seventh
period with us, but you know how kids are.
The day I turned thirty, I jumped from a groaning bridge
somewhere deep
in the jungles of Central America. Village children
clung to the edge with bugged eyes,
flurries of Spanish showered their lips. Somewhere
between feeling nothing
beneath my feet and mouthfuls of regrets,
I knew the cord would snap.
And when it didn't,
I was swarmed with the stinging knowing
that I had been forgotten even by death
and probably for decades.