Photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University.
Once When Light Returned After a Blackout, I Found My Face Pressed Into a Wall Asking for Help
Enter doubt, and inevitably the sun begins to less
behind the trees,
glinting like a caged animal.
The dark bruises-wide a storm, blackening
eyes airless,
and those lacerations long since sown, regrow.
Like the ghost, like the severed leaf,
that only knows itself painted on the face of the air,
I throw myself
I break myself
against this opened palm we cripple across.
Breathing in
subtraction
and out
an existence
slight
and faceted as pane frost.
There is no protection.
Though I knit prayers:
Some heavy with violence as cancer,
some roped with emptiness as atmosphere.
Yes, I know what comes after the flame: Aglow
that crumbles into ash.
Still, I hunger to claim
that grace
—that fire infolding—
singing out
from the deadness of its hold.
You, out there,
dark.
Apart the walls,
unclose the light.
Let me pass.
Outside My Window a Tree Is Singing Flowers So I Cannot Sleep, I Cannot Sleep
One morning I awake to find
a new place did begin.
A silence
fallen through my skin, covering
everything I knew
ankle-deep.
And when I pressed my ear
to the scar,
heard my cells rebuttoning
that which—innocently—
I wounded open,
I could only listen so long before wonder
grew in through the grief,
put roots
where I'd arrived.
A soundless glare on the road.
A midnight late in breaking.
A violence with a stranger's name.
A body opened for the taking.
For us, the story will always end here.
How does anyone ever forget that flash of malice
that swallows everything loved
into its deep waving
and then ripple-less
abberates?
One day someone will unmake even you.
Though the worst is,
they will put no thought into it
and afterwards, away.
The silk griefblossom of a new face,
stumbling up
from the fracture.