open canvas

i.

mayday, how many bodies does it take to build a pyramid? crash land in memory that the factory is not born a tradition but from the barrel of a gun while fine print scribbled by jesters in courts have one hand in the currency of greed and the other in the capital of will.

ii. mayday, this is a state of emergency, the body is bared to surrender community for self, slaved to birth things they could not call their own all to shoulder a promise of tomorrow as tainted feet stomp soiled grounds.

i.

how does a mouth claim to walk tattered feet, to pledge allegiance to the ground where sweat seeds soils to feed tongues with gnawing teeth;

where toils bring harvest for ivory  children while calloused hands are born from earth to earth.

ii.

no “I understand” will ever be the hour hand submission, a body’s surrender in a crossfire, the suspension of divine to make gods out of bullets.

iii.

I imagined the phone call when a chorus from your lips grew bigger than the room.

Perhaps there are melodies not meant to be sung but today I learned to listen —

occupying memory, diluting the linearity of time.

That night, in between the questions of where you were and who your company was, I rang to your chest, 

taking the broken record in the faults of my head  into speech.

it is midnight; a recollection

the taking; to dwell

in ofteness -- regret,

an allusion of

that is to say,

a dangling of letters,

the mechanization of language

to be held by tongue

that is to say in ofteness, there is

you

the first attempt at love was to study your name, carefully arranging each letter in tongue

afraid that it will slide in too far for a swallowing. when you decided to rest between sharp teeth,

carving space my body willingly let you do, latching to every fiber and bones, i in turn

when you speak

your language, a

root mangled under

your tongue, you

begin to step outside

a door, painted with

blue, red, white, gold;

you realize you sit

between door knobs,

unfamiliar of your own

roots, not welcome

the story begins with a mourning mother:

there is a house above a hill and

its teeth gnawed when mouths bared

while hands mistook drowning for sanctuary.

how does a body lose itself more than once?

when six conceived her child

the house built for shelter creaked its roof

and brick by brick led up the river.

when a son is baptized by seven,

the house with ruthless hands and sharp teeth,

the mother counts to remember

Two years before, beneath starlit skies, he was on a highway to a promise.

Two years before, beneath a log clad house, I sat waiting to be held.

“Talk to me,” his voice echoed across the room, the kind that seeps into your bones and rings in your ears. My body remembered this melody all too well: A broken promise of composure. “You know how it takes months before I can come back so we get to have this kind of conversation? Talk to me.”

But I did.

Listen.

I spoke between tongue knots, between salt-water touch, between long pauses and between the days you were oceans away. Two weeks ago, I slept unannounced; another broken promise. One week still, you worried of my silence, spoke how it meant complacency – a silhouette of misplaced idealism – and how anger took off the blinds, allowed light, allowed sight. An emotion against injustice.

You sighed, a resignation from silence when it became loud enough to fill the room. In the space between us, on your bed, an ocean divide made itself comfortable. Moments then, you stood, and your hands found its way to the switch. Just like that, darkness. I closed my eyes as you descended into the sheets, and it wasn’t long after that our bodies welcomed the sea that drowned us to slumber.

It was noon. I reclined to a foreign chair and across me was an unwonted woman. This unfamiliarity felt like a memory that didn’t exist. The woman and I spoke casually until my lungs suddenly sought for air. Bed. Dim-lit. You. My body remembered the drowning, but not what breathing underwater felt like. I turned to face you and although the room still felt heavy from last night’s exchange, I could still trace your light-feathered face while you slept.

between touch,

his thighs, are

unfamiliar roads,

cross-road puzzle

not meant to be

solved, not meant

to be crossed;

sometime after,

he finds himself

back in the forest,

holding a theory

of belonging:

this is wanting

to wander

in obfuscation,

being just is,

covered, paperback

splattered and believed

that meaning is found

in paper: the vows

made in script hold

life in fingertips, how

words held hands,

words made worlds

        but

dawns are ripped pages,

and hands that burn

are ash scattered fervor;

         for

ink do not shed blood

         as

ink guided by white

hands bleed white

Under the blanket of the moonlight lies a four-wall cage called home and in the darkness of the room you welcome the swallowing sheets.

Here, you practice the art of maneuvering: your spine upright in a haunted house with ghosts for dreams and bodies for bones, you do not pray for blessings nor salvation, here, you pray for a god to be out there, to claim what’s left of a half-owned body.

Here, the monsters have a bed, they cut with their tongue, hold you with hands for cages then profess love as if pain was needed first for comfort.

Here, unheard are lullabies and tales, they live between the shackles of your mother’s mirror and your father’s shadow while your body is mapped with scars. Here, you spend time tracing the lines making meaning out of the wreckage.

Now, no longer can you count the days hoping for the dead of daylight, for the rain, for no longer do monsters in the closet remain in the tendrils of the dark.

---

I am made to bleed from  the reckless drift across the  playground — the first kiss of  my open wound, a quest  to search the unknown and  hold it between my hands.

The world, they say, is the way it is, like baby teeth falling out, like a phone stuck in hand, as if it were a distant memory I have just uncovered.

I am made to bleed from nature’s period of estrangement; a life-time puzzle given in the midst of uncovering, a search for pieces that I am meant to build.

Puberty, they say, is the way it is; the baptism that I am capable of birthing change, an oracle reading of a promise I never made.

I am made to cover scars in reaching the boiling point of life — the drying of new blood; its letting go of ideals and settling in the recluse of, “the world is the way it is.”

Menopause, they say, is the way it is; a cage, a  denial of entry. A way to cut  my limbs, a self-induced  amnesia, a game over.

And all the while, I say,

I am

more

than

just

my

bleeding.

---

this scorched body becomes no more in the refuge of the night shackle and dark embrace

it seeks fortitude between moonlight wanes and waxes, estranged by twilight beginnings.

the rubble are troubled ruins and ash-bone scatters: it is the fill of the body, a chilling, ghastly reminder

that failure is not an apparition but a demonic possession. it takes hold of the hollow soul, of scarred skin,

taking parts of the body to be less of itself, forgetting your own name, leaving a blank-slate shadow.

and when the alarm clock dusk breaks the slumber with warm waking lights,

you find yourself in the litters of an unfamiliar room, beneath the sheets that swallowed you whole.