I do not consider myself to be a poet, but I do write poetry on occasion. Here is what I have posted in this blog.
***
On Hunger in the Desert or sometimes i try not to believe in god or Hope
When I woke up, a leather bound bible sat on the hospital table beside me. The pages were gilded, and so thin they were translucent, the black text bleeding together through the pages. I threw it out the window, shards of glass sprinkling onto the floor to be crunched by the nurses' boring sneakers, wedged there to go home with them to their families who sit with dinner waiting. Or maybe they take the shoes off, leave them in the car, leave the dirt and sadness outside their own places of refuge. I didn't wear shoes; the dirt and sadness just seeped into my skin with the glass.
Maybe god still loves me anyway.
***
Prayer
She closes her eyes, feeling the cold stone beneath her feet, the air kissing her ankles as she leans against the altar rail, knees
sinking
into the hard wood. The wood is worn
from the knees that came before. She
crushes her body against the altar rail, pinning her arms
so the wood stamps into her arms. Her body hangs there heavily as her breathing
her breathing becomes more shallow. Her lips part as she tries to speak, but she begins to cry,
her body held up by that altar, arms aching as the wood stamps deeper.
Tears break against the altar.
I watch, head bare. I watch,
and I move to the altar, settling
in front of the woman. My hands, cool like the stone
flutter against her skin, against her hair hanging over her eyes. She opens
her eyes to look at me, but she can't see
through the tears.
The altar
is between us. I reach over, palm holding back her hair
and I kiss her,
Her tears slid down my face,
over my lips,
and I held her up as she sobbed against the altar.
***
Sarajevo
Her body is imprinted in my skin. When I close my eyes, she's there,
her deep voice singing sevdalinka. Her notes are flat, though
flat as though she is not listening, as though she is the vessel through which the song
happens.
I first fell in love with her in books,
in words that painted that sevdalinka in my mind, painted her singing it
wading aimless through the blood in the marketplace after the massacre.
I reached for her to stop her, but she slips, and
the fall bruises her bones, shakes her teeth out of her skull, but the hole in her smile,
a smile of which I have heard only rumors, the hole there
is beautiful.
I tell her that
I tell her how beautiful she is but there is no response
the light in her eyes is a stagnant reflection burned there
that time she watched the library burning,
impervious to the heat of the bombs as they shell the city from above us,
fire falling onto the books in the valley below. I watch her face to see if she reacts but there's
nothing. She has blocked it out like she did the sounds of the screaming animals in the zoo
as they starved alone in their cages.
And even with that blankness behind her eyes I love her.
I touch her hair and tell her I will hold her until the nightmares end
even though we both know they never will.
***
