Dear Poem,

I left the window open all of last October,
and you never found your way
through moon-licked thickets
and rows of P.O. Boxes
to my new address.

Meanwhile, November lost itself to the rain.

Through December I thought maybe
God forgot that cluster of stars
I found you in when they dropped
into the palm of my hand,
squinting one-eyed, upside down
on the purple shag rug.

But you weren’t lost in the sky, just lost
in the mail, along with all Mark’s promised letters,
stuck to the upper lip of someone else’s mailbox.

Meanwhile, the snow got too heavy
to hear the passing cars.

In January you came back
on an x-ray scan of a black pair of lungs,
gulping life with my jigsaw breaths.
Somehow you managed to hide again
behind the Christmas tree box
where we found the wasp nest.
I scooped you between a Goodwill mug
and a pad of post-its so you couldn’t fly away.

Meanwhile, our ears pounded with
beating wings.

In February, I tapped you off the sides,
begging for a sting, hoping 1:30
was the right kind of morning, my toes
were the right kind of frostbite blue,
and the rain, the thunder, the light
from Wilmore’s water tower
wouldn’t scare you back inside.