For Codie, 1995 – 2025

I remember you lay in bed after he was born and took visitors. I, a small child, could not imagine anything more romantic than having a baby and you, surrounded by ephemera, were pale yet blushing. I marveled at your ballet slippers displayed on the wall. Hardened by rigid feet and precise movements, bleached by sun pouring through an adjacent window, stained with blood. Once a perfect pastel, now cracked and faded. For a moment blistered and bleeding, the blemish never washed away. I kept his very first photograph and looked at it so much it became marred with fingerprints.

The pinkest squirming baby

Still bloody,

Rosy as your womb.

Fists clenched,

Braced yet unyielding—

Splotched with red,

never just little boy blue

(more like Baudelaire’s blue shot with rose).

The hue of life

now ever-present as the dew.

Have you tried counting the drops,

have you?

At first I didn’t see but now I do.

It’s him, out the window.

Infinite as tears,

He flew.