—after Ocean Vuong
I have lived around the corner from the houses of jinn,
held collapsed stars in my hands like I could reopen them.
Outside, the street is littered with acorns and the bodies
of dead parables—tell me, do you know where to lay a hurricane
to rest? The old women who interpreted
nightmares and the migration patterns of birds
died last Thursday in her sleep—collect azaleas, minor
keys, other debris of this life. All things return home—
pollen born of dahlias and the last syllable
on your tongue, a night sky with exit wounds.
The whispers of wind chimes cling to the morning
and the bronze I broke off the edge of the sun. In the garden,
the honeyed insides of figs are sunk into earth
to wash over all the death held in this soil.
Look, I couldn’t tell you what the blue jays
grieve, only that they live, so they must
mourn. And I recognize in fire its hunger
or love, maybe I felt that once
in a dream I don’t remember now. It was a
dream of nightjars and a grove of sequoia trees
and other omens of danger. I wake to the sea,
brimming with salt and sleep, mottles the shore.
The sound has slept long years inside the mouths
of bells, and I want to coax it out, the way blood longs
to leave these veins or these scraps of language settle in dense air.
No one sees the bullets streak the sky softly in the dusk,
and every unanswered prayer, splintered on broken clouds,
returns to these hands I hold out for your name.
Used with the permission of the author.