Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.

a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning

a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.

                                                                                                                                       i am building him a morgue
                                                                                                                                                       for Thanksgiving.

It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.

We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.

The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.

I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.

& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse

Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.