Volver (Dame tu mano)
“To love is sometimes a rather disgraceful fear”
— Attila İlhan, You Are A Must For Me
There will be more evenings to fail:
unbuttoned copperpods, a few crinkles
loosening the rose-ringed beaks of waxwings.
Defeather the sky and the carcass of this
dusk is a coffin we haven’t nailed shut yet.
Every mother wears the agate omen of
a daughter she could not bury or flame.
Hair lengthened into a worship song –
glory to bone. Its godly quicksilver. Its faint
saudade hummed to a shivering switchblade.
Glory to breath. Ghostless haunting. I tried
to scheme myself into a quieter animal –
flattened moans, iron-kissed hooves.
But the blood plugged in its tightrope
& all I could hear was hunger, sainted,
stretched between the shrines of my teeth.
fana-baka
i am an explicit failure at teaching the aesthetics of any
veil. god is most Merciful in how He plows my hunger.
my throat is no sirr, His name is not parched in a prayer.
it is an echo unlocked in a foreign mouth. it leaves the low
bridge of my tongue hyphenated by a language that can not
be extracted like a dead wisdom tooth. an app lets me walk
5 miles in the looped darkness of my own room. anti-
depressants are an education in the false dichotomy of
seeing how far you’ve come without leaving where you
were. i watch an elephant give birth—the calf dropping
slick from her tired body like pomaded rock. her herd
catalyzes to a sincere keeping. they say elephants know
how to wreath a birth, keen a death. on the floor, my body
tense in its paused time— slowly flourishing into a new tusk.
—
Artwork by: Charlsey Allison
Charlsey Carina Allison is a short story author, poet, and newbie photographer. She is currently unpublished, but is in the process of procuring an literary agent and publishing a compilation of short stories. She also adores otters.
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Artwork by: Charlsey Allison
