creamy eyes

Things that were beautiful today (April 29th)

• The woman with no shoes and the girl holding on to her cat as if the world was falling on her toes 
• Hearing your voice through the computer screen. It sounded like envelopes burning in the fire, wrinkling and shivering. It felt like roasted almonds. There was nothing I could do, but let it wrap around me and steal winter away. I don’t think I’ll ever get it back. 
• Going to the market in the city where you barely saw cars and everyone rode a bicycle. The market smelled like sweet and spicy herbs, which I found in the very back (jars and jars and jars of them). I also found a store that played old Persian music and felt like home, I wanted to curl beside the hand carved wood and sink into their hollow dimples. 
• Homemade tea with raspberry leaves, chamomile, hibiscus flowers and ginger root. 

Things that were beautiful about today (April 26th)

• The songs that came from the fireplace and through the water-torn pipes. They made my fears go away for a while, and that itself was quite a lot. 
• There should be more, but that’s really all. There’s nothing else. There should be more. 

(IV)

There are no more blank pages,
I have filled them all with my screams
and hammers, all in the geography
of the night or in the mornings when
there is still no light, but the one
melting the wax of these candles,
They smell of you and they reek of
you and the death of seaweed at 
the witching hour, yet they are better 
than the obtuse drills of table side
lamps and night lights, dense with 
trampled earth (my own).

Things that were beautiful today (April 23)

• The little ant that roamed restlessly on a young leaf, confused, or maybe just thinking of what to eat next, where to sleep tonight, how to pay the every growing electricity and phone bills. I told him everything would be okay, but I don’t think he was listening. 
• Finger twitches, oh how you sleep so gracefully, with the taste of terracotta soldiers remaining on your tongue hours after you’ve awoken from your dreams. 
• Looking at people, like really just looking at them and not through them or inside them. You see their distinguished movements in slow motion, the pacific winds as they breathe, and it’s almost as if time has turned into a liquid molecule, as if time really exists. You stop calculating their wrongdoings and watch them ease in and out of life a few meters away from you. 
• The shadows in my room that were cast by the street lights, that peered through my open window as the wind exhaled. Their orderly lines in the outskirts of darkness, sometimes yielding to the quiver of a tree branch. Sitting on the ledge of my roof, my hands holding my knees soundly, wondering where the moon was and what it was up to. I was thinking that there should be nothing more beautiful than this, yet I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of homesickness. Sometimes it would wash away by the sound of the sprinklers. Sometimes it would be painted over by the hue of April’s foliage. But it never left me completely. 

things that were beautiful about today (april 22nd)

• falling in love with the trees. the old ones that reached the tip of the sky and the young ones we planted (happy earth day!)
• watching the children with dancer eyes, the little girl with raspberry hair and  rosy cheeks who smiled so often that I was convinced the world might not be so bad after all. 
• feeling something I haven’t felt for a very long time. 

I ache for you, recently,
for your skin to inch across the cold ground,
the shallow pores that veer your anatomy
into elder trees, arched like a sleeping willow
in alder groves and ivy spines awakening,

For the thesaurus to lend me words,
the language of hands writing letters across the bark,
at night, sometimes about love, but mostly death
and the fear of disorder, of displacing our tongues,
where my lines evaporate in mid air long before
they can smother the fire that is sprouting
from the forestry of your sleepy bones.