In a house whose walls are song

 Earth would be my lover. 

In Bangladesh, there’s a woman who carries drinking water across a bridge; had I known the bridge was her spine, a spine that labors like mother's sweet, swollen birch, I would have known that when she spills, the tear that lives at the corner of her mouth returns sanctity to soil: dancing her socks off

the rock explodes!

In dusty summer heat, there’s a child who sits in the sun of things we need. Someone else's baby, blue convulses out his mouth until his feet glow. Grounded, my brother — the color of my hair:

in his lungs, hairs entwine like a tree.

In the Amazon, there’s a secret among trees only children can hear with their feet. It says winter in a single breath. A breath that channels Saharan phosphorus through their toes, and kinship across the Atlantic — because digging soil binds them to dust, and it protects them: the here and now 

the elsewhere exists to offend you.

In a house whose walls are song, in Binghamton, we make melodies with sticks, and break in dance to drift across Earth's face. I want to hold her in my body
her mangled roots
her give that springs back 
her staticky fingers 
flora and ocean
youth without wilderness. 

                Lover, 
                I too have love to give 
                though it's past midnight 
                and your nail beds lay corroding 
                against the teeth of your heat
                        you've turned over 
                        the last leaf

                        I have love to give too

˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚

Written for Binghamton's 2-Degree Fest in August

Wound Maggot

Whiskered are the words that describe a wound

wriggling with maggots at the bus stop, where

wild imaginations wallow at this proclivity: waiting.

The man tells me the infection could not rest,

for waiting meant to pounce when least expected

and yet, to die before you can.

The woman in the café waits on her lover and mine for my call,

though all proportions of lack disintegrate

into a momentary elision of grief— we wait.

*

Streets turn to sand in the wind, spewing my absent linger,

on the bus as I sputter goodbye, and all sense of direction

strain in passing— here to elsewhere is moving.

The woman tells me she’s moved on before she came,

for she could wait no more; this long-traversed passing-through

is full of suffering, yet an end must come briskly.

When transient, our sorry remains sorrowful, grief ghastly,

longing laborious, home haunting, remains always a remnant:

if in motion, we get dizzy, and stumble, and succumb, and slip away.

*

Even far away somewhere else, the essence of death is always

hallowed out beyond reach, and, still, earnestly drawn arms

embalm exhaustion from the previously emboldened life of want.

Among the man and the woman and I, an excess ebbs in between.

It’s the residue that emulsifies in our place, as we endure our unending expanse,

and, even at the periphery, we wait for its coda, move through its sand.