Instructions for Living by Erika L. Sánchez

Instructions for Living

 

It was the way summer hunted me:

a sequence of instructions

in the folds of a flower.

How do I explain the hatred of the sun,

the terrible wonder of being alive?

Fuck the fucking birds. I looked

to the sky to join the storms. I couldn’t

have imagined you, swift as the lightning

I traced with my finger, a song scratched

into a back. I ached with the not-knowing.

On Mother’s Day I knelt and begged

for something to help me. Is that God?

I played “Here Comes the Sun”

in the psych ward and everyone

watched as I shook. This

is not true, I said. The sun

is already here. Hope was slight

as an eyelash. How clean the sky—

a cloud that posed as a spine.

There was no container

for my despair. In your face I saw

a sequence of instructions.

When you touched me, I named

the future: Be here. Stay living.

I was running once. Did I tell you

how I wept like that? I saw a fox—

my life bound into tricks. The past

is the past is the past. An idea grown

in the name of the obvious. How

a beloved becomes a stranger

and a stranger becomes a beloved.

I can hate what is true, the thick beauty

of it. I am always in the school of the dead:

a bracket, an aside, a reordering.

I tell you language is always a failure,

a string waiting to be plucked. A song

you love and cannot resolve.

What’s the difference between

rupture and rapture? Not even salt.