Nightcrawling

by Leila Mottley

spine erect like redwood trees,

The way the music combines with the chatter to produce a chorus of muffled fuzz, like a melodic static.

and I don’t know how bodies can consume one thing and produce another,

The flying moments solidify inside my rib cage like a photo album in the body. Trevor and I sweltering, jumping, always close to the sky. Alé and her weed, that smile quick, Sunday Shoes, funeral day. For these moments, I forget my body is a currency and none of the things I did last night make any sense at all. Trevor’s body, the way it fills up with air and releases, reminds me how sacred it is to be young. These moments when all I want is to have my mama hum me a lullaby I will only remember in dreamland.

know the ocean makes you believe things when it fills you up and tonight I am brimming.

An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.

Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.

art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.

We always showing people our hands like it’s proof we’re human.

every sea creature would hear my sounds travel through the molecules. Nothing got an end in the water.

“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.”

Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.

Somebody always owning the woman, knocking on the door so all she has to do is stand there.