Atonement

Silt settled in the urn, boxed. Six-foot cactus 
standing watch over the bed. Contrails stitched 

across the oranging sky, seven a.m., still 
awake. My body rested in the reminder of yours,

this curved, aged living: a small shadow in your 
pressed frame, my shoes still on from last night.

I want to call you to tell you that your 
finger impressions are still in the soil, marks left 

where you buried bagged fertilizer last year for your 
towering palm, the water somehow not filling in the holes. 

There is something here about ashes and dirt,
dust to dust—but I have not slept and my shoulders

cannot stretch the width of your imprint, decades
and decades behind us. Somehow, outside, 

there is a plane flying up and up; they are going 
somewhere that is not here, somehow further from 

the farthest place I have been. Jet fuel and ice crystals
trailing its path. The front door still has five locks.

We keep our ghosts very safe, I say to no one, turning 
over into the pillow, your hair stuck to my eyelashes.

JESS KIM

Jess Kim is a New England-based poet who has been published in Yellow Chair Review, at wherewithal press, and in the anthology Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women’s Poetry (Deep Bowl Press, 2008).