My first city breath without you brought drafts of soot and sharp pebbles. I remember how my throat burned parched and bloody, how muddy my mouth turned, lips parting subway tracks, carving out a nest and exhaling a corner of your absence, leaving a piece of it there. I held my breath the rest of […]
Read more...I wonder if your pinpricks peak when mine do– In the almost-waking morning, when our love would come in rustling sheets, a left-arm reaching, pollen coats the top layer of a dream we were both in, a sigh into your shoulder like an exhale into Sunday, the hours we have before your train back home. […]
Read more...Sometimes, the ammonium smell of the curtains closing in comforts me in a way only chronic panic can. From a distance— peace with a hairline fracture— the hour turns from morning to too bright. My tasks are acrobats; they balance on tall shoulders, somersaulting through unchecked boxes, tightroping between tight timelines, and as I watch, […]
Read more...1 I thought, it’s a wonder how quickly those eyes can render your borders translucent under certain light– Your ecosystem of 25 years, disorder and triumph, dimpled peaks and valleyed base made opaque by a scan and then avert– a calculated refocus relocation to a smoother landscape. And suddenly, you’re an outline, minimized and blurred, […]
Read more...I can breathe in pebbles and breathe out powder, fine dust ground from inner churning, excavating, grating ruminations— I’ve done it all my life. Wake before sunrise with granite under my tongue, still under covers, I feel its course coat, how these years have shaped you, taste its metals, how your bitterness works with you, […]
Read more...Between us, words drill their tummies with a needle and crochet themselves over the threads that connect our morning breath. Shallow words, but ours. Our concave sounds, bellybuttons bounce on our sleepy string, beads reading happy morning and good Monday and I dreamt my leg traced your inner thigh in your sleep, that I […]
Read more...They ask: In what language do you dream? In poetry, propped up with proper punctuation; pointed and poised, periods and pauses in their perfect places? Do you build moon castles with well-fashioned brick fabrications, cinder blocks stacked between slabs of sleepy cement, stone peaks place kisses on a star-grazed night sky, do you see in […]
Read more...The art of tracking breaths before a year’s clock strikes: boxed inhales and exhales, even oxygenation, in one— fresh out of studies, a future grows hips two— early twenties, a crisp December sunrise three— a kindling candle, a new job in Manhattan four— a nest at a turning corner, retrospect, almost recycled hiccups, cough, halt, […]
Read more...My favorite tree dyed itself amber overnight— where it found its overtone, from muddy roots or sooty sky, I couldn’t know— Its covert shift, so unforeseen, morphing in the span between my early rest to groggy rise, its yellow struck me paralyzed, its vibrancy sunkissed my eyes like it sponged daylight into its hand— […]
Read more...In the tunnel of my lifeline סבתא שלי חיה, היא נושמת 1 her humming echoes, היא ממלאת את דמי בשיר 2, she drapes her prayers inside me כמו חופה של ברכתה like fresh linen clipped to a clothing line מושעה, מתנודדת בנשיפת אלוהים, 4 She swaddles me in her mother’s fabric המצעים שנתנו פעם לאמא […]
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