If We’re Going to Talk about Love, Please, We Have to Talk about Violence
Half-past ten               the sun on its axis.

You have needed me for hours

like I have needed sleep—
I don’t know how to keep me responsive.
The first sound is the suburb, then the furniture

vibrating with address for the phone I promised

I’d keep close to me. You have needed me for hours

though truth is
I don’t know how to keep me responsible.
Stop you told your partner that day, and he didn’t

or at least not until he had proven you responsive

in the way the cops weren’t responsive

not after the first couple of times

though staying safe isn’t that easy

which you know by your skin first
then your skin. 
21, you loved to think Schrödinger

was pronounced shrodangle and that all cats

can be said to be there and not there, really,

such is their nature
and mathematics has serviced us with knowledge that

everything must be begun and ended in the sense that loving

gets the better of the way we have suffered to love each other. 
Once, a nurse told me we are an anatomy of discrete,

closed systems—nothing that enters these bodies holds
Or perhaps his finger’s grip on the pulse of your agency

was never or always there. I cannot not remember it,

the threat of his texture—ache before injury which I

too felt for having held you
but now am holding you in the way sirens hold the night

their promise to keep injury imagined, just a little longer, now—
You ask for the day and my attention.
Everything I had missed
and not missed.
This poem’s title is adapted from a line in Emily Skaja’s ‘Remarkable the litter of birds’.