13. Grace Street, Richmond, Virginia

To You:

This year has been an angry fumbling
in the dark
I have torn through pictures of you
muted Polaroid pictures
of our bodies postured.
With water in my mouth
I've shuffled and reshuffled
all the things you showed and said
and suffocated in the humid grief of silence.
My mind has been in tantrum
throwing thoughts like punches
into the wind from your departure.
Your swift flight into the openness startled me
as if you had died unexpectedly
in the birth of our creation.
I, this screaming infant
Wrestled from the womb of words
you spoke
of how each piece of me was yours
and that we were bound in this perfection.
I wrote you off.
Then I wrote you a letter
begging for you hands on me
and you came in hurried aegis
like a parent to a child in nightmare.
A return like a hushed lullaby.
I finally slept.
I finely slept.
And awoke with the taste of honey.
But daybreak brought stillness
and my awakening from a puerile dream.

From,
A