What Erin Won't Say

What Erin won't say
because I'd make me break:

“Nothingness is good
but nothingness is deaf
yet not quite the same
as dead – her big incorpo
ration is pulling straws
together, somewhere by
the acute angle of a bed
and bedroom, inches from
a ledge and her incubators,
children she lined up
like in a boring movie
where an apple won't
mean an apple ever,
like the straws that tie
men's hands together
in time and in crime,
Erin was nothing but a
doubt, waiting to become
a wrecked interstate fault.”