Murata

we named you Soren and let your golden curls grow long let you toddle in the orchard gumming fruit child i wish i knew your favorite color or where your plum tree would have grown wish i could have drunk the honeyed weeks you would have bought us from the grim grief i see that cheshire grin worn soft on a new face hear little feet that would have run into the curtains if i’d let them kick around inside my ribs if i hadn’t swallowed hope of better days of change if hadn’t choked down bitter truths and bled

i would tell you it was like watching my life on film without me in it it was like cooking all his meals around a chasm in the floor

i slide out of my skin become the bedsheets and the ceiling opens up to leer because your body cannot be your own when you carry hot coals still left from fires lit between your legs but there is still wine and more long nights of loneliness for comfort when i can prop the ceiling up on woven words and stare through empty windows drinking, thinking always, never

do you remember when we’d write poetry on rainy days and weep? you were so alone and i was so embroiled in love that bruised and broke. i thought he’d lost his old gods--the snowfall and the firelight of love but all there’d ever been to him were caverns. holes. maws never sated. those gods were only lies drawn on curtains, hiding monsters behind them. but you. but you were lemon balm in flower beds, plantain in the fields. you were stakes tied to my sapling life, more color than any spectrum. and now we plant our garden beds, nurse sunlight and sparkle through the dark. now, we plan our meals around the dinner table. you take off your shoes and i take off my laces. now, there is a home in me, meant for you.

i wish i could write you out my dreams tell you how arachnids reach and ants crawl up the walls and how i wake up screaming half way across the room so you could tell me i was something more than the symptoms of four letters so you could remind me how to breathe and lead me to where my voice is buried and show me how the world has softer things . how i am a softer thing