by Amy
Faster Louder
I have to ask if it is our responsibility
As living breathing human beatings
To share beauty with each other
Or if it is our real duty to subject each other to the elements,
Watch the struggle,
Drag the lover out of the snow,
And breathe life into the frostbitten toes
Making light of their strength and their muscles and blood
Telling them you just like how they look in the morning,
That’s all.
For Someone Without Enough Words
After the night with the blankets and guitar and the tea and your clothes, my car was still there in the alley in the morning
After the night that you said not to say sorry, your car got towed
And on the ride home that morning you said that you would pay to stay with me, anyway
I thought that it would be red when we kissed
I only painted the walls so that they’d start moving
He just stood there and waited for me to speak
Me scraping with my nails against the inside of my mouth,
My hands creeping up through my jaw trying to push their way out
I thought I’d love him with my words
I thought I’d warm him with my tongue
I thought I’d tend to his wounds with a blind back when he needed
Handsome man, pity tall
He tried to pick me up once, crack my back, to resolve my core of twistedness that he felt in his own, asked me to walk on him to relieve the tension, but I never needed anyone to walk on me I needed to walk beside someone and so he picked me up and nothing cracked so he never picked me up again
And he cried his eyes were red I couldn’t tell if he was high
Like the night he cut his thumb on his stupid red glass pipe
I hated that fucking thing
It advertised its life
With a red and twisting stripe
That he thought he could breathe in
I could have been that stripe, I am I am
He said I had that all inside
He said it never escaped around him,
And that’s probably because I coughed it out so hard it went up into the air and joined the stars because even stars aren’t tall enough to reach the other stars
He is so long his legs hang off the bed
He pressed his heart against my back he said he pulled me closer when I slept he said I woke up one night and said we were going to miss the hike,
I was dreaming of Masada, I was dreaming of Israel
And I missed my desert I missed Yerushaliym
The night I lost it to him he said he knew that there was more,
He said he thought I had a spirit that I didn’t show around him,
He was right, in Hebrew school,
The teacher framed Ruach and gave it to me
I used my only phone call for him
Because my pre-paid minutes didn’t work
He said that he’d turned into a dirty pot head
I never said I was in love with a country
I showed him the video I took above the oldest part of the western wall
The men chanted and stomped and they sang and babies saw
With their head-wrapped mothers up above the western wall
We women stood in rapture and we swayed and sat and sank
Waited in line to just glimpse the red over the men’s clenched hands
Their knuckles swept the torah further from the ark
And clasped the scrolls so tight that their joints became the torah’s own
And we just stood and watched the dancing,
Too crowded to move by myself
So I let the others move me
And I let my hands touch hands like themselves
We can’t remember how we felt when we lit up and light up all at once
My father says I light a room up,
I never want to be a woman who just hangs up the phone.
I want to run and engulf the sun’s whole mouth the ocean sinks inside my mouth my teeth afloat amid my gums my beating gums that together with yours could have withstood more heat than they’d felt before
The sun in my mouth comes from oceans I haven’t lapped up yet,
Down on my hands and knees like a dog, praying to what’s lower than me
The ground that keeps me up
But when he broke his first pipe
He bought another without the red stripe
He bought one that changes color, from white to veiny blue
When someone smokes through it
He bought one with less light and less color to match what he’d, oh no, so high-
I hate to say it
I hate to be the one to say it after he said it after I didn’t say anything in response but no no no you’re wrong you’re still you and it’s ok-
Because I should have said it’s freezing in this room
