in the photo, it is my fifteenth 

birthday & i am opening 

the navy, palm-sized box

​

i imagine the silver bracelet inside 

once looped around my mother’s 

wrist when she was my age & her hands

were too small to hold 

 

onto river water unspooled, its surge

heard but never felt 

​

* 

​

a history unopened is imagined 

as weightless, yet it pierced 

through the center of my body 

before anyone realized 

it was there 

​

think gilded blade severing ribbon, or mouth

filled with water & smoke: another song

lost & buried in silt 

 

* 

​

like any empty room, i am tired of mourning

the faces in photos i cannot name 

​

* 

when i was still nameless, 

i was found 

​

in a box left on summer-hot steps

somewhere in a country 

whose language lifted ghost-like 

from my tongue 

before i ever learned 

its taste 

 

beside me: powdered milk 

to stave off 

some predicted hunger

​

* 

​

i wonder if the woman, who i imagine

has the same hands 

i do, or the same voice—all rolling

marble & thick bell ring—i wonder

if she remembers my birthday

​

​

​

 

 

 

The two of us sit on the dark lawn

beside the terracotta terrace, soft

lit amber straying from the one

open window of the farmhouse.

​

We speak outside of ourselves,

this stranger & I. Those inside,

whose voices I could not assign

to faces, lie alone in the lamplight

​

of their unlocked bedrooms: drift

from thought to thought & from breath

to breath as if each were only some

passing fallow doe, none of which

​

they will recall—& none of these

fleeting selves will leave the privacy

of their own bodies—once morning

waxes above the cypress & above

​

our little lives. The woman

beside me offers stories of her

sister, her childhood city, but

never what brought her here.

​

I imagine each story falling

into the nets of grapevine fields

below, or sent to the sleeping

cinta senese down the path as if

​

they were lullabies. To believe

those animals also need someone

to listen to. To know each story

is evidence of our own survival.