blue toes nightwrite

My toes turn blue
because I love you
so much in fact that the moons could collide
in my heart and there'd still be enough
room for all the cats in the world
to come in
and sit down
and curl up
when it's cold.
My lizards sleep at night
so the mice under my bed have no company.
It's hungry company, though, not the kind you'd want
like weevils
snuggling in baskets woven from the root
fibers deep in your soul,
fibers that tie
us to each other
so there's the tug in my chest when you run, telling me to follow at least with a letter stamped with forever, my mother's footsteps above my head and my grandmother's even farther up, above the clouds even
because she's dead
and that means she can fly now,
though I see birds on the ground every day.
A white dove nested in the highway overpass for a while, nodded at me in my car as I went by a bit too fast. One day, she was gone, and I wanted to cry because sometimes I'm sure no one else noticed her. She was so quiet, and the birds with songs are the ones peering ears seek, the ones netted and stuffed down pantlegs and caged, not free to leave like my one white dove, the only white thing that stood apart in Thurmont, and I know now why we cage the things we love
because now all the overpass tells me
is that I don't know where she went.