I make love when I am bored. That’s how I know I’m an intelligent animal. It’s easy to tremble—a pistil brushed with a bumblebee’s fur— and who doesn’t want to be golden, like pearls of fat glistening in an artery or a mother’s first milk? I want to send you photos of dead fledglings on the sidewalk, those perils of the lavish season, but we are wrong, a news story tells me so, explaining beauty drives evolution, not a mate with an advantageous beak. I wish I could tell you this. Letters and novels keep seducing me with their fantasies of closure, but I like the way your silence wastes inside me. I am a grieving animal. Let’s not pretend souls are beautiful. They’re as ugly as white petals wilting, crisping and curling in on themselves in cloudy water and green-rot. But let them fall into me like loose change in a leg cast. What’s broken cannot be healed with anything but superglue and imagination, but let it be tended to. Let it be tender. Let’s imagine a miracle together at a distance, the reunion of a pronoun and its first verb. I’m not over it—the elk’s blood blackens the bottom of the fridge, and when I wipe it, it leaves a pink quarter, blood-ghost, hunger stain in the shape of your birthmark. I’m a regretful animal. My heart tries to grow as fast as velvet in May. It’s trying to attract an ending with a crown of daisies, an archive of spring, of wants, of waterfalls, of woods, good God, I know you won’t take me back.