I Cry Often Because My Decisions are Hawks that Eat My Eyes and

a cop pointed a gun at me when I was in my apartment, but it was
the wrong apartment, but the gun was the right gun and it was
the right cop and it was the right Wednesday and it was the right
memory that made me realize I have to write poems before the bullets
and the smoke and the pollution of those who are only concerned

with themselves come and take me back to the moment on the play-
ground where the fight was lost and the child three years older than me
kept going, kept lining my skull with yellow-red, kept erasing my future,
and the scar on my face is permanent so that every time I look in a mirror
I cannot simply look in a mirror; instead I have to be transformed back

to pavement with the nearby merry-go-round that was broken where
we’d sit and we’d sing The Beatles to make fun of The Beatles because
we thought their songs were so ridiculously repetitive, but that was before
I knew how repetitive memory is, how hard it is to forget, how I went
to a hypnotist to erase the memory of the helicopter on fire in the military,

the bodies melting, and how it worked, because I insist it works, and I didn’t
tell her about the pavement and so the pavement stays on my face and I
remember how, when he finished, when he stood up and disappeared, I just
looked up at the sky, softly bleeding, the storm clouds coming in, how even
the sky looked like it was ready to fight, how cold and long and grey and dead

Thank God for the Healers of This World, The Ones Who Don’t Quit When

we quit. I had one PTSD counselor who told me
to imagine clouds. She had me close my eyes
and see clouds. She had me imagine a moment,
any moment of horror, and to put it on the cloud.

Have it sit on the cloud. And let the cloud fade
into the distance. Which is what clouds do. Let
them go. Allow them to go. And then she did
this, week after week, session after session,

insisting that I controlled the clouds, that I could
control the sky in my mind, and that all I had to
do was allow the memory to rest on the clouds,
where it wanted to go. I didn’t have to fight to

put them there. They wanted to go there. Your
bad memories want to go there. They want to
go on the clouds in your mind and just fade away.
You just let them make their way to the clouds. Go.

I would

punch myself in the head to try to
erase my mind. When I learned that
when you cut, you are cutting every-
thing deeper into your body, one of
my counselor’s grabbing my wrist
and looking straight into my eyes
and telling me that the way to heal
is to heal, not to harm, that to heal,
you have to heal. I remember her
yelling, To heal you have to heal!
how deeply she believed every
word, how red her hair was, how
she seemed on fire with caring.