The blanket I’m wearing over the jacket over the sweater over the lava barely keeps me warm on this, the first October day of holding the broken sparrow out the window in both hands to heal it with the integrity of weather. “I have not forgotten you,” the sky says to the hurt wing it has shined over and under the aerodynamics of in the coy manner of being its usual ebullient self. The last time I saved a life I was twenty three and thumped a heroin chest in a doorway in Detroit and breathed mouth-to-mouth shovelfuls of the daily recommended dose until what was coughed back tasted I can only imagine what a toilet tastes like if it woke one day as a guy named Steve who’d smacked his way just shy of the opacity of the cheap tissue you find on planes in a bathroom so small it’s like you’re being told you’re not wanted inside heaven. I looked through his walking away to his dying soon no matter what God put on his to-do list near Wayne State University being not a state so much as a hamlet amid what was once a form of vibrancy known as an American city. How did I get so sad when I possibly don’t even exist reminds me of all the birds I never had a shoebox for. Are we alive, is that all we’re proving and need to prove: now I’m happy we don’t fall upon our sandwiches with questions like that, that I found the eyedropper and that it’s named for dropping what it doesn’t actually drop. How weird would that be? Plenty, I tell the bird not listening to me with its open mouth aimed like the last chance I hope we’re all given at water.