Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one-eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, “I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock,” and we both cracked up like it wasn’t December and we weren’t under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was.

* * *

The official cause of death, I would learn later, was an overdose from heroin laced with fentanyl.

* * *

Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.

* * *

But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

* * *

You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.”

* * *

—

One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff.”

* * *

“Maybe they should have a stop sign then.”

* * *

We had many stop signs on our block. They weren’t always there. There was this woman named Marsha down the street. She was overweight and had hair like a rancher’s widow, a kind of mullet cut with thick bangs. She would go door-to-door, hobbling on her bad leg, gathering signatures for a petition to put up stop signs in the neighborhood. She has two boys herself, she told you at the door, and she wants all the kids to be safe when they play.

* * *

Her sons were Kevin and Kyle. Kevin, two years older than me, overdosed on heroin. Five years later, Kyle, the younger one, also overdosed. After that Marsha moved to a mobile park in Coventry with her sister. The stop signs remain.

* * *

The truth is we don’t have to die if we don’t feel like it.

* * *

Just kidding.

* * *

—

Do you remember the morning, after a night of snow, when we found the letters FAG4LIFE scrawled in red spray paint across our front door?

* * *

The icicles caught the light and everything looked nice and about to break.

* * *

“What does it mean?” you asked, coatless and shivering. “It says ‘Merry Christmas,’ Ma,” I said, pointing. “See? That’s why it’s red. For luck.”

* * *

They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”

* * *

The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?

* * *

It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.

* * *

There was a war, the man on TV said, but it’s “lowered” now.

* * *

Yay, I think, swallowing my pills.

* * *

—

The truth is my recklessness is body-width.

* * *

Once, the anklebone of a blond boy underwater.

* * *

There was a greenish light in that line and you saw it.

* * *

The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.

* * *

—

I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. “Looks like you dropped your tampon.” Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.

* * *

Using a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, Purdue sold OxyContin to doctors as a safe, “abuse-resistant” means of managing pain. The company went on to claim that less than one percent of users became addicted, which was a lie. By 2002, prescriptions of OxyContin for noncancer pain increased nearly ten times, with total sales reaching over $3 billion.

* * *

What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets?

* * *

What if art was not measured?

* * *

The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.

* * *

The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.

* * *

The first time I saw a man naked he seemed forever.

* * *

He was my father, undressing after work. I am trying to end the memory. But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back.

* * *

Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even.

* * *

Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.

* * *

—

I woke to the sound of wings in the room, as if a pigeon had flown through the opened window and was now thrashing against the ceiling. I switched on the lamp. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Trevor sprawled on the floor, his sneaker kicking against the dresser as he rippled under the seizure. We were in his basement. We were in a war. I held his head, foam from his lips spreading down my arm, and screamed for his old man. That night, in the hospital, he lived. It was already the second time.

* * *

Horror story: hearing Trevor’s voice when I close my eyes one night four years after he died.

* * *

He’s singing “This Little Light of Mine” again, the way he used to sing it—abrupt, between lulls in our conversations, his arm hanging out the window of the Chevy, tapping the beat on the faded red exterior. I lay there in the dark, mouthing the words till he appears again—young and warm and enough.

* * *

The black wren this morning on my windowsill: a charred pear.

* * *

That meant nothing but you have it now.

* * *

Take a right, Ma. There’s the lot behind the bait and tackle shack where one summer I watched Trevor skin a raccoon he shot with Buford’s Smith & Wesson. He grimaced as he worked the thing out of itself, his teeth green from the drugs, like glow-in-the-dark stars in daylight. On the truck bed the black pelt rippled in the breeze. A few feet away, a pair of eyes, grained with dirt, stunned by the vision of their new gods.

* * *

Can you hear it, the wind driving the river behind the Episcopal church on Wyllys St.?

* * *

The closest I’ve ever come to god was the calm that filled me after orgasm. That night, as Trevor slept beside me, I kept seeing the raccoon’s pupils, how they couldn’t shut without the skull. I’d like to think, even without ourselves, that we could still see. I’d like to think we’d never close.

* * *

You and I, we were Americans until we opened our eyes.

* * *

Are you cold? Don’t you think it’s strange that to warm yourself is to basically touch the body with the temperature of its marrow?