Exit Interview

My heaven is a metric one, like my mother’s.
Upon arrival, we pray some angel shows us
spreadsheets—charts and maps, graphs
and infographics. How many naps did I take,
over how many hours? How many hearts
did I break, and how long did it take them—
on average—to recover? My mother wants
a count of steps, the volume of bodily
fluids. She wonders what was her top-
speed, her total mileage. Incarnate,
she keeps a tally of every mile she’s run
since my birth, a tiny tabulation
in the corner of her calendar’s squares.
When she hit ten-thousand, her then-husband
bought her a customized trophy. How many
hours, total, will it take us to heal from his
indiscretion? How many children, total,
did he masturbate to, and how vast a network
of hurt was he a dot on? I wonder about the dye-droplet
of my words into the internet’s water—if it bled
into how many stranger’s homes. How
many people will read my poems? If I
find kind words and diffuse them far,
will I dampen these knots and help them to loosen?
Did his images of little girls come to him
in .zip files, and from where? How many times
does a map of lost-innocence wrap around
the planet. My mother wonders, if every shed skin cell
from her entire lifetime was pressed
into a giant ball, would it fit
into her bedroom. Would the volume of her
exhalations fit into a stadium, a cave? The odds
are astronomical that every human breath
holds in it a molecule that once passed
through Christ’s lungs. Centuries out
of my tenure on this planet, I want to watch
a geographic time-lapse of my presence here:
the pinprick of the first improbable
cells meeting, my first cry sending traces
of DNA into a hospital room, my steps dragging
my residue all over the planet until I also
become pervasive, maybe constituent enough
to be a moot point, overall.