finding our way out of [with h.]

Year seventeen and the cicadas never found their way out of the ground.

A missed return flight. If only to be born of metal.
How to hate the body, so easily broken:
cancerous or full of bullets. How to be
so empty we float, find our way out of
the dirt into the dust on the floor

settling in, or just settling

drinking wine from your hands,
the dizziness of a staircase. we think
we are not in love and that no one can hear us, a sound
like the crack of a sunflower seed opening- what will soon
only be a hard shell. you say i shouldn’t be broken
only in case of emergency, say in the mildest of ways yes.

if home is a confession,
none of us are returning
our ways out of the dirt
our dust on the floor

the door, they say, is for passing, so this is not
another poem about stay

i am okay with that. okay
with the afternoon phone call
to say good-bye. more like too bad
i’ll never see your silhouette
against an east-facing room

my hand on your neck, fluttering

never will i see
these two chests rising and pressing against fibonacci’s attempt at halving this distance between us
halving the atoms between fingers saying
never will i reach you but with this i will try

to leave all our small givens
(as in me to the sand) or you’d let me walk,
call it desert

the planet, Al-Quarif rising over Egypt.
across islands we have found each other.

the color of water in the sky and on your chest
and i knew that my palm pressed against
it would go through, it would go through
the center of this nebulous, this extensive,
this figured out by now, this called
this new kind, this world
should have understood,
this love.

these are the states: cloud, ocean, water in the glass.
my body must always remember that.

the rising of the sea. so empty, we float.

what of the gathering forever in your ocular duct? what of the explosions on your cheek?

all the water in the faucets, in the rivers
the earth has turned to sand. clean
as it has ever been, squeezed through millenia,
through rock. through an ocular duct where it rests,
quivering above a cheek.
all the precious things you've given me
have turned to sand.

the shadow of a pen
my face in the bottom of a drinking cup

you may never again enter this café.
i am okay with that.

i will keep my heart and my belly and my palms
my eyes have been writing songs again
have been bursting open
and your embers fade in our city by the lake.
neither of us, however perforated, are going back.

yes and honesty are two different moments

all the same, eventual patterns of night
one truth begins to unravel. a thread
becomes caught, a button
torn loose and a thumb, fumbling— the pastor begins
his sermon: Who here, among us now, believes in God?

don’t want to kneel to this ordinary noise —a sigh,
an inevitable dizziness like we’ve lost our home in the night
or spent it arguing about an absent rib.

you unfold your hands just outside the window,
check the glass for warmth
a palm across a brow before we go and nothing,
not fumbled thumbs,
nothing will bring us back.

it is okay to see names take flight
you’re not convinced of expirations
suggested sell-by dates
my very breathing.
sand means you, me, glass: two throats turned into stone

for just a moment, i ached. these are the ants across the page.

the rising sun making shards of this morning heavy with scattered light
waking with your elbow in my mouth has punctured our silence
i would do anything not to relive the moments of you
barely drawing breath
our love cancerous or full of bullets

a return flight The script says cry like we’ve lost our house in a fire, rooms full of precious things dreaming of a staircase means we're leaving
dust on the floor means we’re never coming back