There are only so many parallel universes that concern us.
In one, he isn’t dead.
In another, you drink light with your hands,
all winter.
There is a universe in which no one is lying emptied in the street
as the gas station burns,
a universe where our mothers never had to learn to wrap their bones
in each small grief they found.
There is a universe in which there is no difference
between the past and the ground.
Another where the oceans pull the moon,
and so on.
This is an incomplete list.
It has been abridged for your comfort.
I could tell you about the many universes in which bad things happen to people
other than the people you love.
Yes, in another life, it’s someone else’s sister
who climbs to the roof that night.
In another life, the boys rise darkly from the asphalt
to choke the engines of cruisers,
and no one gives birth chained to a hospital bed.
And no one’s child washes up blue ashore.
Sure, you can have these ones.
You can warm them in your hands at night.
But know, that by signing here, you agree also to be responsible
for the universe in which the oceans glow red,
the universe where what we call shadow is pulsing with the musk of hooves,
and especially the one in which humans do exist
but only in the nightmares of small children.
Will you hold that one too,
the version of the story that never learned to consider sound
and the one where sound is only the opposite of metal
and the one where not even the sound of metal is enough to quiet the dead?
—
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