Let this poem be healing and if not let it grow into a brook in my mouth. The mouth is a hollow for language. I know little of what shreds a child into two countries, but I think joy returns to the flushed roof of my palate when my mouth tenders Igarra. I’ve been thinking about the way devastation ends here— I mean when spring herself wakes at dawn. This might have meant freedom. Or was it a metaphor? I have a confession: I have seen the most ordinary thing about loss, it’s faces. It’s June and I’m waiting to cross the corner of a sidewalk so I can drink coffee and read a book alone, surrounded by gossips. On days like this I write myself jealous poems. I watch myself fall in love so humanly. The vague dripping sky is a tiny reminder of my painless heart. Maybe I am someone’s bane. Today I think of chaos, the opposite of clarity— I seek poems in which I am bloodshot, undying and wanting. I need to know if silence is the only passage through time. I need to know if I am worth saving. In another poem, I read myself as a green blue-grey ready to beauty its own sun. Days unsound and my first desire is to listen to the rain. Like the first time I arrive here, I let myself imagine I was juvenile and my body, small and
wondrous.
