A benediction of starling breath
through Gianna’s bedroom curtain
stirred her father’s dim blue thoughts
that nearly summer evening
Gianna might have watched for him
through a chain of cotton eyelets
Mama tapped the glossy portrait,
the soft receiving blanket
her Daddy still as stone
She only knows he couldn’t breathe
Soothed by kitchen voices
Gianna dreams in lightyears
sighs an origin of tessellations
drops into vaporized
nitrogen fixing redwoods
patients 80 years unborn
treasure her hand-me-down quarks
She never asked to be a scion
Grown, to trip daily over
new apertures into his death
Grown, her face will find his in the streets
Now sugar spins cobweb galaxies
double pendulums elbow room
in chain reacting spacetime
She’ll be a doctor a mogul forgotten
the country’s measurement
how far we have yet to go
Her mother smooths the blanket
the child's only undertaking
dreams in roller coaster velocities
her father's sun-warmed shoulders
her father
to breathe out the sun