First they took my Mother

Suppose
that I wake up tomorrow, and
my body is worlds more than a select
gathering of light. Kissed passionately
with bruises, marked by a distinct violence.
And suppose this air,
a flame in itself
rejecting the lives of that which it burns,
was something those who are lucky enough
to never taste danger on their tongue
like an ulcer: large and rank;
a body, eating itself in the most
sickeningly deciphered way.
Something they could grasp at, taste,
like the skin of a lover pressed
earnestly against two lips, parted,
swallowing final words as they emerge
like blood from a newly opened wound.
I don’t remember the specifics.
More the shape of your body
as I held you in sleep.
Peaceful, like a broken clock
face, easy to read. Internal, holding
road maps pinned up with the little wrinkles
above your nose, the unconcealed
birthmark just
beneath your brow.
In my arms here, you, lonely as a
last soldier standing against the enemy,
were beginning to drift slowly from reach.
Like a ship caught in the wind and pushed
recklessly into the shards of rock , left
eerily as a memory, bandaged up with slight
survival.
How you shrank into yourself, as though
even your soul was something to hide from.

The gunshots had flurried, rising up like flocks of birds.
Your eyes fluttered awake -
your uncle clutches his heart,
falls
to his knees and smiles.
He smiles red. The pearls around your mothers
neck like small moons losing their sense of light,
as she moves quickly between the trees,
two hearts beating in a single body, running
as fast as the second hand tics –
The life within her, a reflection in the beats of sweat
upon the bow of my lips,
minutes before it had
been smashed across the ruins
of a small, bombed city.
Teach me, I would’ve said:
to hold the hand of man and
never feel the need to run forward, towards an
ocean penned into
a stormy abyss, to shatter my
body like water shatters the vengeful feeling of thirst.

To live in a world where you were still alive,
and I, am still your child.