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Psithurism

I exhale & I let go of a jagged myth, // a small blade.

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
April 26, 2022

Say there is an answer to this search; 
the wet song of a wooden silhouette, the hollow body
& its carnivorous nostalgia, tumbling from its sour roots

into my ears. O, I was so sick that I mistook my flesh
for hunger & swallowed a fistful of newborn ghosts, incensed wind; O, I couldn’t
breathe enough space into my bones, not with such a sodden tongue; 

O, my limbs are always forgetting 
how to dry, forgetting themselves 
on the transparent edge of a whisper; O, O, O—

my mouth is always this open, always
this brittle shade of silver, this frivolous & glimmering & close
to being whole. I exhale & I let go of a jagged myth,

a small blade. I am as tall as the trees
that have survived; clinging, to the heirlooms of rain.
This air that will not forgive me. This body telling me to try again. 

Morning rends my weakened knees to the aftermath of petrichor,
the soil’s molasses-slow rot & its cannibalism, exhausted
by the muscular effort of knowing. O, I can’t fall any faster. 

I can’t say tomorrow; say, there is a place; say that I am too tired
for silence, for my granular tongue, my lineage of stains. O, I am always ending
in forests, burying my reflection where the skin is missing.