Among the things I’d rather forget

Is the wind chime you made

Out of grandmother’s kitchen knives

The same ones we used to set the table at Christmas

Are the ones you used to chase the opossums

Gliding through barbed wire along our backyard fence

Late at night, and then somewhere in the darkness you pulled me into

To find them

You said they listened to us in our bedroom

Creeping up the walls and looking in while we slept

How crooked their teeth were

Their breath pulsing against our window

You wrapped the knives in twine and spent all afternoon doing so

They hung from sticks I helped you glue together

And they caught the sun at seven o’clock

During summer, when that hour is the entire evening

You said they felt the glow of the blades

The breeze would come later, and then bedtime, but you wouldn’t sleep

Sometimes the knives would chime

The soft down on our necks rising

Your breath shallow beneath the covers

They didn’t come the rest of that summer

But in November, early one morning I woke to you

Rocking back and forth on your bed

Your hands stained and shaking

Downstairs in the backyard

Were bodies in the snow

The twine had torn

From knives spinning through the night

I can still hear their chimes

And your breath shallow beneath the covers