Read A Broken Sequence of Bodies here:

What’s a cadaver? I asked the funeral director.
Something that’s dead, she told me. Something that once
was alive but now,
it is dead. And we keep them.
Why do we do that? I asked the funeral director.
We use them to learn things, she told me. Maybe we can learn what not to do.

In the casket, now, I’m remembering. Or perhaps seeing the future:

I saw a butterfly that had died that was being studied and I thought what
on earth or off of it
what could we learn from this thing that was once alive but now is dead, how does it move on from here?

I used to see the end of life as the end of everything. I forgot about the soil. I forgot
about the clipped wings and the flooded river banks
and the day the cadaver

put its hand on my shoulder,
when the funeral director said we could learn things.

And so I.

Forget how to breathe when I remember I want you more than I wanted to
not want you and my body
gets pulled in the upwards direction, amber liquid fights gravity,

preserves and perseveres.

Dead love
is the same as alive love
and our love
was like crumpled petal love
broken mug love
shards of glass love
rotted flesh love like a cadaver’s hand on my skin, cold dry dead weight.

I forgot that the first time I held your hand
and the first time you kissed me
(the first time I kissed you)
we were dying all of those times. Always dying,
and looking at the dead things like we could learn something,
Learn each other in a mess of other dead things with a clock ticking down on the time we have left.

But we could learn each other better, maybe
if we acted like cadavers, if we reached out to learn about the life on the other side.

I thought you were like a cadaver. Did I tell you that? Thought I could learn.

I thought your skin was dry
and cold and your bones were brittle under my fingertips
and I didn’t think you were very strong but you were stronger with the amber liquid covering your face and melting
away life like that isn’t its purpose, I thought about preserving all wrong. It’s about souls and not faces.

Maybe the way I felt about you was dead all along. Shattered glasses on pavement dead
curdled milk dead
rotting flowers dead

you and me dead like all along.

The first night we spent together tastes like the things that get stuck in my throat
when people ask if I’ve ever been
in love,

tasting like dirt bile sand silt seawater
until I cough it up and it settles over the world and makes everything seem dead.

Here’s the kicker
in that
well, I wanted to love you
wanted to love like you and be loved by you
and see our love be
morning sunlight alive
blooming orchids alive
golden feeling wasted alive
the rise and fall of your chest under my hand like the rise and fall of a cadaver’s chest as it touches me

just like one night you rose out of bed, went to breathe outside anyway.

Was it me you were thinking of? Wasn’t it.
No grave is only one person, bodies,
they decompose and give way to more dirt and more soil
and eventually the bodies melt away to make room for more bodies like empty apartments in manchester
we filled with something like love but also like death
until it turned into just death and you flooded the bathroom
and I felt the flooding in the kitchen
and in the flooding together maybe
we were alive for just a second before we swallowed
the black waves swallowed us whole.

Did you want me dead or alive,
when I wanted you through both,
during the years we spent dancing around the dirt I kept coughing up
and the water spilling out of your lungs,
like every time you touched me you were touching something dead instead?
When I could feel it every moment, the shadow of you and the shadow of the dead hand my skin didn’t forget
even when my mind
did.

I think I wanted you alive the same
you wanted me dead but the same, dead in the way all dead
things stay beautiful.
I think morticians are a myth because every corpse
looks just as wonderful as it did when it was bleeding, coughing, falling.

Bodies don’t decompose if somebody loves them
and that’s why I asked the funeral director what’s a cadaver?
Because I couldn’t recognize the way the face looked so clean and so human. Something that’s dead, she told me. Something that once
was alive, but now
it is dead.
I let her keep going and I stayed behind to look at the dead thing with your face
that I wouldn’t recognize for a few more years
wondering how something so beautiful like butterfly wings
could stay not breathing when your chest rose
your hand rose
you looked at me and you told me

wait.

I could stay not breathing, could stay beautiful for you.

Skip ahead to the funeral,
When I’m a cadaver and you’re not even if you want to be,
And you remember the first time I kissed you
(the first time you kissed me)
when I told you about dead hands on shoulders and you asked
me if I was okay but I don’t like lying and you don’t like being lied to,
so I told you I was dead.
You told me we were all dead, after time. Why else are they called organisms? Why else is it called nature?

Is that the opposite of a cadaver, I asked you. Is it an organism? I think it’s the breathing that does it, you answered.
You proceeded to steal mine. Forever stolen breathing asking,
why are you here right now?

When you could be somewhere else, coughing the water out of your lungs, mixing it with my dirt to plant new things that will die as soon as you
look away.

Skip ahead a little further to when
everyone leaves for the burial without us
saying funerals are for the living
so the funeral director moves on and it’s just you and me
in this room
and you’re waiting for my chest to rise and fall just for you, and I don’t have the strength to tell you it always did
since the moment you laid your hand on my shoulder,
now the other way around.

If you come a little closer I can reach. I can breathe.
My chest rises
my hand rises
I feel your dead skin under my fingertips and you’re not even surprised. You get in the casket and you kiss me hard

stupid desperate kiss
numbing whiskey sour kiss
cocaine heroin kiss
that goes on forever while both of us aren’t breathing.

Caskets, coffins, full of dirt and soil
silt and seawater,
both of our curses.
We look at cadavers to learn something.
We look at cadavers to learn how to climb out of dead boxes

and then we do.
And we run away, don’t breathe. That’s the kicker,
I want you not to breathe
and

we become something other than the life cycle. Petals fall around us in air, dirt on our heads, rain on our eyelashes.
Coffins and cold tables have nothing on this.