Tell me about how you used to catch butterflies in fisherman’s nets that were stained with the breath of the sea, about autumn dripping down your bedroom window panes, swallowing up the sweet October sky before winter crept in like a fog, about braiding snowflakes into your hair, tangled Christmas lights that glistened like gemstones. Tell me about the crows that dove through the air, singing their strangled symphonies, the tell-tale sign that spring was approaching. Tell me about taking your chapped winter skin and turning it inside out, painting your organs the same colors as your dreams, the same color as April; tell me about jumping over sidewalk cracks for good luck, picking up dandelions and allowing the yellow petals to be picked up by the wind; about clumsy jazz songs echoing through your house and collecting blueberries to put into wicker baskets, storing up for hibernation.

But also tell me about waking up at 3:30 in the morning with panic jerking in your chest and the velvety ocean of night trying to consume you whole, about collecting snails with colorful shells from the mossy bricks of your garden, sealing them in a jar tight, finding them dead hours later. Tell me about trying to peel shadows off the walls, about cracked wrists, hearts shaking December. Tell me about the girls with slaughterhouse mouths, throat-cutting tongues, about the women you see on magazine covers with jutting ribs, teeth stained with stomach acid. Tell me about how you broke lungs like glass, stomping on the fragments with the heel of your boot. Tell me about the little boy with autumn eyes and blue overalls spinning out of photographs and tell me about how much you miss him. Tell me about your light and tell me about your dark.

This is a poem about your dark and my light and my dark and your light and this is a poem about balancing them out with a scale, about trying to guess the odds, about manipulating your evil and betting on your good. This is a poem about you crying black tears in a supermarket bathroom, about you waiting for the devil to come collect you. I stroked your hair, kissed you slow so that some of my light would spill through you like honey, but black was still burning you up. You begged me to rearrange your bones, and so I sharpened my teeth with whale bone and I tried to turn you into an angel. Somewhere in the sky a star burns out, and the wings I painted on your back shrivel up and tumble to the floor.

I used to be summer and winter, good and evil, a spider web of black and white, but God, if there is a god, said let there be light and I was pulled apart from the depths of my being until there was a jagged fault line running through me, a scar that would never fade. You used to be all dream, with echoing lullabies and sweet thoughts blurring together, but you have become more nightmare, all gut-wrenching screams and razor-blade nails; God said let there be light and you were blinded by all that you weren’t.

This is a poem about being tested to the very bottom of who we are, about all that is buried in our flesh and blood and marrow. This is a poem about us morphing into bluebirds, singing and spinning along to spring; this is a poem about the winter cold whipping at our skin, about Brooklyn biting us back. This is a poem about your dark and my light, about our chiaroscuro, about the sun melting into my skin, about the moon tracing along your outline. This is a poem about God saying let there be light and this is a poem about me trying to help you and this is a poem about you stomping on hope, on light, like glass, the heel of your boot managing to crack every piece in half.