ramna

June after June, our mamas wave their yellow shawls from the balcony and ask us not to play too long in the sun. Our people do not tan, they'd say, we only grow too brown. I think about our girls relegated to the shade. I think about summer as a softening peach and a thick, molasses kind of love in its pit and brown girls being denied a bite. I think about sugar in the frying pan — about sizzle, about white becoming caramel, about all the sweetest things only growing sweeter in the heat.  I think about the sun  and the way it ripens and also forgives. About its fire growing arms and holding our girls by their cheeks and whispering into their mouths: I do not bite. I do not bite. I think about letting this benevolent sun swallow my skin and about this being the perfect way to rest, my brown and the soil as one. I think about epitaph — here lies Ramna,  she played too long in the sun.

This year, I am relearning to be chosen. Which is to say, I am relearning the way a kiss swings its golden legs off the edge of your lips before falling into a red and laughing mouth, like a heavy, heavy poem. Which is to say, I am returning to myself, to water the houseplants hung in my corners and shake the dust from the shelves and reread the pages bent backwards. This year, I am relearning religion. Which is to say, God is a microwave meal and the sermon sits, swelling, on the brow-bones of the women who love me. Which is to say, this is a prayer and in my own way, I say it loud. Which is to say, I whisper it into the morning, when my voice is still remembering itself. This year, I am relearning to be touched. Which is to say, I am remembering the way to empty someone into yourself and walk into the night and become lighter, become light.

She was the start of a beautiful hurt. In the right kind of wind, her evenings sung  a lot like losing. When the air grew sharp, she told me I was easy to forget.  When the air grew biting, I believed her. He is not a God, she whispered. But you will bend your knees to his absence anyway. You will ask so often for an impossible thing  that it, too, will become prayer. Her stomach was a hollow promise  and I was dancing in it.  She kissed me cold. Taught me the names of lakes so deep that bodies can go lost into a wet nothing. Taught me that this hurt is a body in its own way, with its own kind of drowning, with its own kind of failing limbs.

Silly girl. His throat is a hornet's nest hanging in the forest. Most days, you could not tell the kiss from the sting — this is the anatomy of a love worth forgetting.  Silly girl. To have something  and not have the room to keep it.  To swallow the fog.  To chew the smoke. Silly girl. Soon, there will be no more  metaphors and the language we speak will stop sounding real. It is just the way the crooked crumbles. Silly girl. Take a nap in the back seat. Drink up the orange glow of 8am.  Wallow in the lonely of healing. Silly girl. When you are smiling for the camera  and you forget where to put your hands, bring them up to your sides.  When your arms begin to burn,  pockets of fire in your elbows,  memorize the sound of occupying space.

and I can't imagine a time when I don't pass through and your sound is unfamiliar was what you said before  we both imagined  so hard it became true