Who taught you to play hop scotch?

i play hop scotch on walkways

behind the mausoleum that I still think

looks like a museum.

i am a child of catacomb bones

that ring like wind chimes

in November. i like thumping

in the throat of this farm house

at midnight– my breath quick

like i am alive somewhere inside

my own coffin.

When i was ten i discovered

rigor mortis in the body of a dead bird

— i couldn’t put it down.

i am a girl who

makes a coffin on my desk

out of posted notes–

an undertaker of unfulfilled plans

to walk across a bridge so we can count

fish waiting patiently

and ringing bells above their heads.

I’m not thinking about suicide.

I’m thinking about dying

not like the fixed letters on a gravestone– in an unexplained

wincing of a door frame kind of way

like wearing your dead grandmother’s gloves

seeing your dead aunt in pictures

tasting an element of her smile

in a stale package of M and M cookies.

In the pause after you hear a dead person’s name–

that passing though

And they’re not here anymore

But they were.

I’m not thinking about suicide

I’m thinking about haunting  the creases of this house

and kissing your cheek in curls of steam

escaped from tea cups.