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I once wrote letters to a prisoner at Guantánamo. The letters always came back / opened.
The first capturing your gaze into nowhere
the other when you covered your face with your hands
so you were not anonymous, only unseen
in 1989 you walk the main road to /
Tiananmen when the inexplicable /
hits
Why didn't I just say / people like us here / at this table / should not just talk about politics
Relying a little less on the odd language we’d been left inside / we turned back to feeling: — / more moan, more mumble.
Your lone question —
What happens when you ignore a part of someone? —
Would flood me, and in time, knock down
Every structure.
most days, during some mid-day hour, / I close my eyes and say the Sh’ma. / But it’s always the wrong time of day, / and it’s the only prayer I know
a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.
My life too has ended
many times over. Now I’m
doing all I can to return
even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.
it’s happening / again. everything / outside me / get to switching / channels. brown black / carbon black / black cat black
there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all
I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.
To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.
My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.
The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.
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