How We Exit With Grace
You’d expect the softest adverbs,
underscoring a slow emergency.
The step and freeze of experience
pulling the tapestry loose as we run.
Say all museums open low-lit as life,
waiting to harbour a late intruder.
The man I love knows he’s welcome
because these relics lie untended.
But anything behind glass could be
deemed both weapon or breakable.
There is so much I risk losing either way.
Still, the doors remain unguarded—
A ribboned dusk shredding
the display cabinets. Their contents
too much like my mother’s precious china
—reserved for important guests.
But, my hands have left her belongings.
Nothing of this architecture
vacates the truth more than your footsteps
and the fountain in the foyer.
Like Niagara — several thousand tourists
flocking to its silver. Paying to witness
the rush of falling water.
I wish you had never let go.
Two of us sliding down rough tundra,
ice numbing our skin to the past —
the Atlantic’s frothy skirts, lifting us ferally.
I wish that were how we’d left each other.
Strangers passing through revolving doors,
hearing the roar of salt and breath—
knowing what must be left wild.
Where They Move Like Angels
It is no small sin to need
another heaven for us to speak again.
I, laid still beside your reliquary,
a dove leaving behind a hollow
within two fists not meant for war.
Our colours conserved behind your lids—
and I am convinced this is true sleep.
Death doesn’t end in one breath or place.
I have been walking through albums
and records regarded as extinct,
seeking laughter in lost mediums.
Because any musician knows
how performing in an amphitheatre
is a far cry from the mundane
circumference of a burning planet.
Sound arcs according to our grief—
and love has a habit of pulling
in the non-listener. For what we
cannot see, we compensate.
A chorus bends ceremonial—
my hands knowing all the notes
without care for the instrument.
Light shatters to mask the errors
as honey left out freely during a ration.
In this field, I do not fear the sting
of what I may disturb or awaken.
Nor the cuts that show I’ve tried.
Tried sleeping keenly, like those
whom I never really knew.
In all mirrors, a mother’s face maps
an imminent ice age. Shows how it tempers
to prove our bodies’ once friction—
or at the very least, two palms pressed together.
The heat and the sense that you are alive
—praying, mostly for me.
* * *