birthday cards

i cannot buy enough chandeliers.
i tell you, "i know i don't need another"
but then i'm clicking "order"
& committing several atrocities 
to get one. hang them in the closet.
in the bathroom. inches
from the ground & tight up to the ceiling.
once i saw a transphobe on a forum say,
"if we can identify as anything,
i identify as a twenty-year-old."
i thought, "kind of valid." i have
thankfully never studied metaphysics.
the birthday cards have been coming
every day since i was thirteen
& tried to become a jump rope.
they are never from the same people
though most of them have no signatures at all. 
empty little congratulations. 
the ones with senders are always family
who are dead. they switch up whether 
or not they misgender me. i wish
i was still angry about stuff like that
but i am just glad they remember
i am alive & trying not to die.
they sent me a chandelier once
& it was made from my father's beer bottles.
i put that one in the crawl space 
for the rats to dance with. 
i do worry what would happen to me
if the cards ever stop. i've gotten them
from exes too & wanted to tear 
their wings off & compost them.
then i remember their birthdays
& something in me fills with geese. 
it's the tether. the little foothold we keep
in each other's lives. i am not sure if
i am sending cards too. maybe it is
like breathing. everyone walking around
with thousands upon thousands
of birthday cards. i wonder who burns them
& who keeps them? who buries them
& if anyone shares them, saying,
"i am somehow alive." the light from
chandeliers is always mosaic. 
still life of a river. all the cards take flight.