SoundlessWhispers

We are blooming with vacant pleasantries, hands miming gardens out of air. We cradle a silence that cannot be pruned, holding quiet vigil for second chances. Repeat funerals in barren soil, because this is not the second time, nor the third or fourth. But again, we contort ourselves into planters and we fertilize with hope. We plant seeds, and we may not know what will grow, how to nurture a fragile, living thing, but we know the shape of space taken - stolen or given. We may not know the pace or the patience to trust what's sowed, but we do know how to brace for unknowns; palms uncertain of how to hold life in deserts, coax the quick rhythms of pollinators buzzing to and fro. Might spring flourish, and pin satisfaction between our hands, the tips of our thumbs turning green. As long as we have hope. As long as we know the shape of gardens.

I've been replaying that angle where your eyes become a horizon alighting like a sunrise, and my heart a migratory bird changing course to stay for winter; to nest comfortably inside the wildfire struck in my chest, embers suspended. Flaming front between us, the rolling smoke unspoken hopes rising Before I knew it, I was full of you, like helium.

We sit across from one another in hazy pixels, states apart, and project familiar strangers. Aligning ourselves like observatories tracing recognized constellations, and we never point fingers at the red shift

I am waking up before the sun. I am throwing exhaustion into bags beneath my eyes like I am packing for a long vacation. I am peeling open, like an orange sunrise spilling hope I photosynthesize. ‘Home’ illuminated gently, in increments, patient in belonging. These moments growing seeds of joy to burst with life.

I watched those oxygen tubes snake into you like translucent parasites, rather than donors feeding you oxygen as if you were a deflated balloon, skin sallow and paper-thin, as if upon you I could write poetry. I could hear an avalanche in your every breath. You tried to laugh through each burial, and when your voice shook, we both, with such synchronicity, heard the monitor counting down seconds rather than heartbeats. There was a ghost in that sterile room, in that white silence between seconds. We were spelunking fear through the claustrophobia, stripped naked. I struggled to parse apart the whiteout, trying to orient time and direction. I wanted desperation - search and rescues, alchemic formulas and philosophers’ stones… What I found was a sparseness that echoed, and I ate my guilt gluttonously, like I was starving penance. Wishing that upon you I could write odes… but there is no ink for the storm happening around us and between us; only that

I sat and gripped your thigh like a child trying to give comfort, arms wrapped around you like the trunk of a tree, sending prayers down to the roots, the growth of you. I felt the strength of you, standing amidst the ghosts of loggers, shaking but immovable; a silent protest holding up years, even as I felt the age of you fluctuating timelines like a car changing lanes, weaving black lines atop a blacktop, headlights wisps blinking unseeing into the dark. I felt the spark of you burn wild, firing flare guns -- screaming the injustice until your chest was a hollowed cathedral where you crouched in unbelieving confession. I felt the resilience of you. The way you held yourself together, even when you were coming apart, like a ball of yarn, the end held tight in your fist. You gently worked out the knots, smoothing frayed edges, so that you could continue weaving yourself into love and into hope.

I baptized myself in a dam, amidst the algae and the fish; in interstate lines on those two hour road trips to see you, singing along to the mile markers I remember feeling powerful, something as simple as smoothing my hair back rendering you speechless. It felt like a coronation: crowning myself a monarch, your hooded gaze wrapping me in silent regalia. I wanted you, like a sphynx to the riddle of Cleopatra, my dormant longings yawning awake like winter thawing into spring — blooming, a dizzy pollination through my veins like stretch marks as I change, under your fingers, aorta like thirsty roots begging – touch me more, I will grow around you and through you, I will fertilize the soil with your sighs, carbon dioxide kisses to the flowers sun leaning, some meaning to the slant of your summer skin singing pink, reflected in my eyes as peaches and rye

not an arachnid dot on the spider web wavelength of timelines: we are the flies twelve faces to gluttony, static intermingling white-noise haze like that over the eyes of San Francisco Bay, blinking open into sea glass washed ashore

I was still aglow with summer's remnants until I heard a knock at the door, and there was November, grinning - gutted on my stoop, its teeth flashing ominously like a collapsing Jack-O'-Lantern laughing through the rot. The sky begins darkening early, as if it, too, has lost the will to glow - a reluctant tugboat pulling winter into port with laboring breaths of smoke, like a morgue crematorium having a panic attack of appetite down to its bowels, stomachache of ash and doctor's masks, bile rising ocean tides, rubbed raw like disinfecting, discarding myself like single-use plastic, over and over again. The fish guts burst with me down someone's hungry gullet, carnivorous turned cannibalistic. How much can be left of me?

I harvest uninhabitable worlds, dismantling entire landscapes down to particles that I inhale, a jolt of creation, flushed fanatic, where I am a god sitting upon a throne of tragedy and time all the lights are out, my reticular veins aglow with traveling stardust, mesmerizing cosmos circulating circumstance is a window, opening and closing, dropped through the slats in offering to the maw of an unsatiable appetite