ode to you, if you ever go

all i want to do in math class
is write poems about my dog
& how we buried her in the yard
that one winter
when you weren't there to see
and there was blood on my hands
but i was still clean
when the rattling
of her bus-crushed bones in a wheelbarrow
became the thud of her frozen name falling out of my mouth.
grieving her turns into grieving you.
winter is gone
but loneliness
still snowballs

i know you are gone now,
burying other madnesses
in another backyard, while i hang myself
on the trees in mine & think about how
my dad could've saved my dog
if he would've fixed
the fucking electric fence
like he promised a thousand times.

i promise a thousand times
that i was still clean, that winter when you left
before the dog died and you weren't there to tell me
anything comforting like you always did.
i needed to be tethered to something's gravity, i had
a mind made up of the way my dog's eyes look when she's dead and they're still open

&

there were ripples of reality
wading in
&                                                                                               out.
i was drowning out the sounds of my sobs
with the wale of the vacuum cleaner,
erasing blood stains
i cannot be held
accountable for,
i cannot be
held
accountable
for,
i cannot forget
the way my parents looked digging graves & sobbing in the dirt, my hand
clasping the lantern in the nipping dark
to see the death splayed before us
one last time
before the next last time.

i am clean now
& i am so dirty.