Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.
They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.
We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.
Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.
Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.
Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on.
The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.
Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted.
The children screamed. Again!
