Status Updates From THE DEAD & THE LIVING

His eloquent face
grows thinner each hour, the germs use him
like a soap. Exhaustion strips him, and under each
layer of sweetness a deeper layer of
sweetness is bared.

as you
slept in the quiet, I watched you as one watches
a newborn child, aware each moment of the
miracle, the line that has been crossed
out of the darkness.

She protected me, not as a mother
protects a child, with love, but as a
hostage protects the one who makes her
escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s
body held in front of me

Let her sleep as long as it takes, let her walk out
without a scar, without a single mark to
honor the power of fire

your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer

Deep in my body my green heart
turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the
pond, under the thick trap
door of ice, the water moves,
the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet
heart visible in its side.

nothing I experienced was worse than death,
life was beautiful as our blood on the stone floor
to save us that

the noise we
feel in the silence of the photograph
the way the deaf see sound

It's fine so far. Olds does this thing where she equates child death to the tragedy of being unable to have offspring and like ok??? I'm pretty sure the tragedy of a dead kid is the fact that a kid is dead, not that they can't reproduce???