Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock Pocket

Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock Pocket

Sometimes I dream:

That I was trying to walk the crosswalk 
and my shoelaces turned into tiny serpents 
that tried to bind my ankles to the white lines.

I tried to unlace them, leave them in the street, 
but each knot undid re-knotted  into more vipers
streaming confetti fire from their forming tongues. 

Under the flame came their ophidian chant.
“This is how we learn breath from fossil.”
 I bowed- Nill- then, to the God of sidewalk cracks.

Seven moths flew from the chasm. I inhaled them.
The last turned into my dead father— with a spoon.
He measured me along my spine. Eighteen spoons.  

“Eighteen to measure the volume of all your grief.”
“Eighteen spoons to stitch into your spine,” he said.
Their metal rattled whenever he pulled back the
 hospital curtain, the scalpel.

Then, I remembered my mother in the emergency room. 
I remembered how it rain, a folding cathedral,
an ossuary of praying knees weeping every stitch. 

In the vision my lungs burned. I pleaded to the city
“May I please expire where sparrows unbutton their songs?”
I coughed up a shoelace, bound myself with it.

A receipt coughed up:  “For one ritual gently used,”
The ritual involved hemlock tea stirred with dog fur
and a chorus of pigeons reciting subway maps in tongues.

As the last moth fluttered down my throat
I hallucinated the moon shaving its legs
while my shadow ran errands for forgotten gods.

Now, I was in the park. A squirrel fell from a dying oak
and  offered me a biopsy note wrapped in birch bark.
On the label- “return to sender.”

And— I finally understood cancer is not a thief
but the Grand Librarian cataloging misplaced thunder.

I watched not in disbelief, but stunned awe,
as the trees braided their leaves into shoelaces. 
“A ceremonial tether”- they called it— and  
snapped it on to my crown, securing it with 
ghost salt— while my father cried, and 
coughed into a Mars shaped handkerchief.

My dog, Kindness Unleashed, appeared, 
kneeling before me.  He had his leash
in his mouth and was wagging his tail 
with the dignity of an unsalaried prophet.

In other dreams:

sometimes its pigeons still falling from the sky
holding fragments of my childhood taped to parsley.
I collect them and put them in my sleep pocket, 
alongside shoelaces, spoons, and my mother’s hum.