You won’t feel like this forever, unless
forever is here. Follow the dark blue
blades of kale, the flat dials of sunflowers
leading back to speech, or its underside.
Love translated you across an ocean
& now you cannot really come away
or say how, exactly, your love began.
Was it music in the mouth, or weeping
in the blood? The ancestral body splits
into water & seeds, pure syllables.
Copyright © 2025 by Kiki Petrosino. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
