the elephants are rising in my chest
covered by your hands and feet
blowing off dead fruit flies from apples and mangoes
in your father’s kitchen
glasses standing in rows like transparent legionnaires
sharping bayonets
eating with your hands, sleeping with your heart
homeless dog, rail tracks, ruined house, needles
next to a field
overrun with wild poppies
rooted deep with their mouths wide open
unsettled and ready
to eat the blueness of my skies
to utter words
whisper consolation in the fat grass
the dirt of the earth
the permanence
solitary spiders quivering
my mother cutting a pomegranate in four, even halves
the first that I have ever tasted
seeds spilling out from your mouth like stones
the splendidness of your face
the pale moon of it
our bodies twisted and bent on my floor
my impatient legs and your hard manhood in the garden
of my overripe, heavy, tender pears
the molasses that I licked off your tongue
when you planted yourself inside my earth
it is not the leaving
I could survive
the leaving
and the flicker of the light on your back
curved like a bamboo tree
it is not the leaving
I could survive
the leaving
unwrapping myself from your knees
the beetles rolling on their bellies
waving their thin limbs, hoping that you would turn them back
to some place
to some greater heights
I sleep under your gaze
like a field mouse under a broom
watching your nose
and the light blinds me
and God reaches out to my mind
and pokes me with his grace
but I run and hide
behind the scarce hawthorns
that cluster and tighten around my body
like wild pythons in the afternoon of birth
thinking
that forgotten people do not live
they do not quite disappear
but the parts of them
once alive
wither
like barren butterflies
with no wings.
