#thewinter

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

From a Notebook That Burned 16. Silence is not emptiness. It’s just me at full volume without translation.

From a Notebook That Burned 11. There’s no word for the grief of almost. But I carry it like a second spine.

Τι θα κάνω με τον φόβο

“I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with it’s painful gall-stones, it’s gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul...”

🪆 The Smallest Silence they painted my cheeks with obedient roses and sealed my smile with varnish so it would not tremble I was born hollow— that is to say prepared inside me another girl slept curled like a comma waiting for her sentence winter pressed its bone against the window breathing ferns upon the glass the men drank silence the women stitched it into linen I learned early how to divide myself twist open offer a smaller obedience a smaller heart a smaller room with no door each of us fitting precisely into the wound of the other my mother lived in my ribs her mother in hers a procession of thinning voices stacked like dark teacups after a funeral and here I stand in a corridor of ghosts and toys— Pessoa whispers riddles in ink, his words curling like smoke around my neck Lenin’s marble eyes blink, cold and patient, watching me unfold into nothing Cheburashka tilts its head its mouth whispering conspiracies and a little bird flutters on the edge of my shoulder its tiny claws digging into my varnished skin singing of a world I will never touch sometimes at night when the house forgets its posture I loosen wood sighs against wood and I hear them— the innermost child no larger than a plum stone knocking she has no paint no eyelashes only a pulse thin as a winter star she asks what happens when there is no smaller body left to carry the cold I cannot answer I only close and close again until I am one smooth silence standing, waiting for someone’s careful hands to split me open and count the sadness one by one.

From a notebook that burned 12. I’ve learned to stop looking for closure— some doors are meant to stay burned shut.