For everyone who finds spring less than completely hopeful.

DIALOGUE

I tell her,

late winter and early spring can
really take a toll on your
optimism and belief in sweat equity: you survived
this long by expecting you’ll get relief
for making it through
the dark months. that’s

arrogant, she says; all you can
hope for is that you’ll
keep breathing
until the wind turns
lukewarm.

I respond that days like this
can hurt worse than february’s worst
knife. just as the crocus starts to pierce through,
you give up and admit that you long for bloodshed,
a drunken fight in a dive bar,
or a sudden burst of deadly lust
that carries you into a strange bed through a broken
window and from there into oblivion; every bad impulse
to self-immolation breaks out as if you were
a ruptured pod. but

it’s not self-pity, she says,
to describe a heart as broken
if it is broken, a fallen hope as
fallen if it has yet to hit the
ground; what you don’t get to do, she says,
is marinate
in the description until
you’re tender.

I want to reach for her
and explain something
I don’t fully understand: that I think we are
not that far apart. all that bloodlust in me
is just a way of acting the same thing she is saying —
but
there are shadows among my fingers
that leave me cold. there are bones

hidden in my flesh that I’ve never noticed.
I’m afraid the sun
won’t ever break through to warm them.
if I try to touch her,
I may shatter.