Here Where I Now Live

(subject line and inspiration from Luisa A. Igloria's Memo)



This summer, everything greets my eyes as messages
curling away from the bottles that brought them.
I swallow letters instead of writing them down,
slide along walls in unhemmed sarongs. I
could blame my unshed weight on the heat --
how it drenches both bones and brain with fatigue
as thick as old curtains, as sad as old stockings,
and how it roosts in abandoned chairs and vandalized nests --
but it's been winters in the building. The breaking
of my clutch-hold on the trash that cannot save me --
it's taking place one line at a time,
my fingertip tracing the shadows on your back
cast by the sun's insistent surge through our blinds.

- pld

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