(cover photograph direction: Ene Ochayi)
do not follow the sun when it sets
you don’t know what will enter you,
the sky will change while you’re gone.
day’s mouth is open wide, lapping up
your shadow before it finds earth. somewhere
on another planet, we are the otherworldly.
yesterday I found the drawer where you
collect the pits of plums and put the silences
that had a special meaning to you.
light lengthens. you think about the way
grapes fall together to fit in your hand
some people feel like that, I worry I am not
one of them. I worry that someday
you will have to remember for me
how to be warm.
geography
he can’t read so he doesn’t know anything about his country
beyond the way it smelled of gasoline and legs
the day he left, he can’t remember before. his only prayer
these days is brother, brother. he is in this America
like a windowless room, no sense of direction
of time of horizon. there are no walls in my country,
he says, that’s how the war got in. on this continent
every life happens between neat white lines and
everyone moves so little. a good father stays behind
to bury his son, but I didn’t.
the mother serves grah to an empty chair
and is growing out the hair they shaved
for a man whose body she already identified
and buried. under her veil, her neck is scabbed,
her breasts are swollen with milk no one
will drink. she is happier now
than when her husband and son were in their bodies
and she had to walk through each day wondering if
this was the one they would leave her in.