#bryce emley

Tell me what you know about salt, how speech can be a kind of thirst. I could swear that once I heard my name as rain caught the fingers of pine trees, that I heard tide whisper into shoreline, I am. I am. Tell me, is it holy to speak, so much fluid in the lungs? That when I listen long enough I hear a voice underwater, feel the Dead Sea pooling in my throat?

“And as the sun glazed him in dusk,

“He says I think too much of falling things, of what comes next. Lately buzzards have been flying circles in my head,

“ Let it be enough for me just to see something beautiful, knowing I couldn’t create it,          only more renditions of the intimate violences          that made us. Father,          let me hold you like wind in my hands,          I want to feel you passing through my fingers, to feel again like a stranger          in another’s blood, the burden of a man she could love enough          to undo her. I want us          to know our fathers as more than the gods we inherit,          to keep arriving into these brutal and elegant days carrying more of the one who made me          than the breath I gathered from her lungs,          to know you the way          we can never know our mothers, mirrors in empty rooms.”

Let it be enough that the world looks alive when it’s wet and so much living is most beautiful when it’s dying.