Ask me what it feels like,
and I'll tell you.
How sometimes it moves between my bones
like a firework.
I reel at it,
The solitary, glittering thump of it.
One note rhythm between heart and lung,
it moves like a bullet hitting the sky
and the bullet is the sun:
whole, singular, stark gold against the great mystery of whatever tomorrow is,
or will be.
I sway.
Slow.
Like heat.
Rumi says the wound is the place where the light enters you.
I think of the wound,
healed now.
Stare at it like it's an open door.
Caution hangs loosely,
brushing against the darkness between my hidden ribs.
I think of a humid breeze,
silk slipping free from a hook.
Tomorrow can worry for itself.
I'm too busy
with this,
with the light exploding.
It illuminates me, you, us.
The ash of unanswered questions
falls
around our shadows, our smoke.
Soft, unseen and
Ignored.
I look at you across the room as though
the room is a world.
Every distance is too close, too far, too much.
Other energies crowd and lean
into the space
where our steps should be.
Sometimes the world is too many books on a shelf.
Still.
Ask me.
Come to me in the sun with your feet bare,
and ask me.
I'll tell you how sometimes
it bursts
like a berry splitting on your tongue.
That sometimes it's a wave.
White foam fists and deep blue blood.
One hand cracking desperate and wild, knocking on rocks,
asking to be let in;
the other covering the sand
like a lover rising,
hunting the ache of another’s breath.
Ask me what it is and I'll tell you
it's everything.
Open mouthed kisses poured along the collarbone shore.
A tide sensing home with
the at-last, come-here energy
of a duffel bag, dropped.
The clap of it on a kitchen floor.
Free hands attached to free arms,
too long spent starved of the softest treasure.
Stillness comes.
The memory of storybook skin slips like water between my palms.
A prayer.
An echo.
Ask me what it feels like.
Ask me and I'll tell you it feels like you.
© Erin Brown, 2022
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