5 Years

.

After telling myself I wasn’t sad,

and eating four spoonfuls of almond butter,

I called my mom.

.

If I am this predictable,

I think, the future should not hover so, breathing

hot anxious into my ear.

.

She told me, she and my

father hope one day I will live close. My friends

tell me they are writing

.

out their next five years

for an assignment. We ask this all the time, open

our mouths for the answers

.

we can swallow without

chewing. I asked him to come with me

to my home time zone

.

and he asked, in his way,

if it was where I would be. What is it

about five years

.

that feels like security?

That word, “settle”, like a closed door,

as if even change had

.

an expiration date.

Listen: the only settling I’ve known has been

upon fluttering, rootless things,

.

a voice on the mic,

on the phone, questions we agree not

to answer till “later”,

.

the quivering curls

of lashes as you pause, uncertain,

on the verge of sleep.

I’m cheating a little, wrote this for a class, and it’s technically not April 1st anymore. Bite me.

Songs Lost in the Surf

There is comfort, being taken

like this. Pouring out my voice,

a thread unspooling into her

depths, while wet mouths of sand

suck at my ankles. I have always

been drawn to casting lines into

places that threaten to swallow the whole

of me – I am a child flinging cries into

the heaving belly of the sea.

 –

There is a stirring of someone

I used to be, in the blood I share

with a people who would dance on sands

like these, skin like dust before rain,

using their hollowness and hands

to sing the stories of how they

became, long before notes, before

the Bible and Crusades,

before celebrities and the American Dream –

none of them saw it all and thought,

“This was made for me.”

 –

Fingers memorizing the dance

of the minor melodic scale. The mystery

of the key of B. The flickering lights, the

dodgy streets in the cities

of diminished chords. I wish someone

had told me what I loved was not

the names, the ways of distancing

the nameless. Had told me, “listen –

the air is waiting to be shaped.”

I wish I had not been landlocked,

the times I thought of my body

as an instrument that was broken,

wish there had been the sea

to draw a stronger voice from me.

 –

There is comfort, a resonance,

facing that which made me. The way

my eyes still speak to her in salt.

My hands, cupped, thumping

the space bellow my collarbone.

The sounds I pull out of my cavities

and toss like handfuls of dust

settling on her rippling skin.

None of this was made for me.