The sound of air smells of China rain,
tastes of pekoe.

Outside
there’s the wet bough of the pine wilted in strain
beneath the streaked window;
green as a dollar bill, weight bending, weight
lowering, weight shifting,
the rays of the sun churning butter, heating the breakfast
waiting on the sill.

The emptiness of the house hasn’t got a name.
I sit on a dowry of burdens left by my father
and his father and his father’s father, the breast of my mother
and her mother and her mother’s mother
never having born fruit,

sweet nor bitter nor poison
to end this arduous story arc.

I entered the world with a single grain in my hand,
a lone fragment of earth, life, and meat, that once I believed
I would plant in the ocean,
give birth to a horizon, give birth
to a child and have them be my soul.

And I know

the weight of a wave, the crash of a wave,
the turn of a wave just before
she dies.

She dies in a shattering, her form melting
over the chest of a man like candle wax,
meeting her god
inside a sandy, coarse body, and then

she escapes like glass

spiking the floor, her pieces skating birds
skimming the air with their wings
that never touch the smell of air, the taste
of dark things
both bitter
and sweet
and black.

When the man is asleep, I creep from the bed,
leap from the balcony,
my toes brush the grass;

I still believe
I can breathe life into the sea,
that I’ve some hope

left.

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