1. |
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when the sky was not the sky
but heat
and smoke
ash settling funereal while we burned our dead alive,
i ran up the hillside, loud, heroic
to find the coyotes pacing menacing and myself the only one left to save.
i filled my hands with stones to toss at red horizons
and shouted grief til lungsore, til empty, til wrung
and my fraying joints carried the weight of me home.
what is the future to children who do not know the sky?
who must shut their doors and learn to build from strangers in glowing boxes?
who must swallow with raw pink throats the words of the arsonists and return the cutting things whole, unburned by acid bellies full of reason, glistening instead with the saliva of obedience?
their future is a bag packed and set beside the door that they have filled with their most precious things, expanding softness testing zipper toothed grip, and which i have replaced with shoes that fit, with water.
their future is to run.
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2. |
thoughts and prayers
03:58
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3. |
turn around
03:48
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4. |
feel brand new
03:51
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5. |
the chase
05:37
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6. |
letters home
03:34
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7. |
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even in sleep my vision is suspect
roaming city streets with unreliable eyes
the cornea of mind scratched and warped
must place my trust in what i feel,
in palms, soles, soft drums of ears,
which know by the crunching underfoot
that i am in a lesser playground
where by day children scrape plastic cups into piles
collecting baby teeth, bone shards, splinters of tibia, femur
to build castles, pat into cakes,
and emerge like ghosts under a veil of ash, coughing skeletal dust –
but it is night and cool
the playground is empty but for a few of the older children
who came here to smoke and curse
to press their mouths together to find softness
their skin glitters with bone in the moonlight
my lying eyes say beautiful
but their shadows are bloody pools
(excerpted from sleepwalker, sarah iyer 2020)
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lay / lie Berkeley, California
to
lay/lie
beside/between
seer/seen
a slash
is a
violent/dividing
thing
(an opening)
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