Paige Passantino

       This
is the life I wanted 
               all that time, the one that held itself

away from me while I kept choosing
lovely cups and creatures, circus-like 
               and therefore real 

        in all their shining. A man at the meeting 
says at least today I’m not doing anything 
               that’s killing me – I think, apart from living – 

yes, this is the life 
I wanted - an instant  
        newness,

          livable at last, and sometimes
lived. And even when its shape is distant, this life feels closer
               than the walk home from the shift 

telling myself not to stop at the corner
or do anything that might turn 
               myself out for the rest of the night– 

         walking to the end of the road 
I would face myself 
              in the direction 

of the house 
where I would go inside 
         where I would not be at the end 

        of a park’s shadow, looking up at a botched moon 
and down at a baggie that had appeared in my palm
             thinking the two were the same.

Couldn’t see the moon 
til the damn barn burned down. 
Ooze of light beaming milky silver 
over the bed’s leftover sheets – 
like strips of a tattered slip, 
or ribbons stitched to pointé shoes 
spinning in soot. Ash clung to the walls, 
seen best in the residual lack of darkness 
after a fingertip strokes the hips of the rafters. 
The bones clung to solidity. We took 
a canister and burned them too, made sure 
nothing was left behind, we wanted to shine 
so bright, wanted some part of us, 
after all, to wind up living.