On Winter Solstice, I Asked a Painter Why

Because I like spit and sinew. Because our rabbit body is prone to flight. Because ghosts coat the back of the throat, phlegmy and thick. Because the distance between memory is cellular, infinitesimal, blue threads stretched over and over and over until they fray, a delicate lace. Because I can’t quite capture the exact blue ink river of veins. Because we steal all the colors from the earth. Because it’s eighty-eight degrees in December and the leaves still cling to limbs, chlorophyllic and heat sick. Because the forest burns. Because the desert burns. Because the sea, oil slick, burns. Because the sky made heavy by smoke makes for the most vibrant sunsets, all blood orange and rust. Because the body is a little blue house on fire. Because Philip Guston said “painting seems like some kind of miracle” and, fuck, don’t we need a little divinity. Because my hands are moth winged. Because I collect myths on my tongue, a red thread in my lungs. Because grief is a small fire burning through the rib cage. Because it forgot to rain during monsoon season. Because the desert is a lesson in resilience. Because Carlo Rovelli said “we suffer time. Time is suffering” and I can see her in the periphery, asleep on the couch in a pair of pink socks, a halo of curls, flames lapping at her thighs. Because twenty-three species went extinct this year. Because I am salt licked and hollow. Because the principle of perspective acknowledges the existence of a vanishing point. Because I will disappear one day with nothing except for blue. Because I am no good at the care and feeding of things—the jade plant on the windowsill, exoskeletal and shriveled, the corpses of geraniums sun singed in a blue ceramic pot by the front door, the walls of my home are earth red and dirty. Because Galileo posits that the distance traveled by a falling body is directly proportional to the square of the time it takes to fall. Because at night, right before the sun cracks the horizon like a headache, I dream I’m a body falling, burning out in the piñons and junipers, the ponderosas light up like a flare. Because winter is skeleton season, and summer is a dry suicide.