& it sounds like a birdsong once remembered,
like the last flicker of a siren after the music fades,
when the ambulance sings, not here, not here.
Perhaps history is what lives in the bones,
what names a body unfamiliar. Skin, as a reminder
of our own capacity for loneliness. To find language
lifted out of centuries & swallow the grief
of a given-name, to soften the ache
of this feeling shaped by air I want
to be endless. O elixir I desired
not for fullness, but for the absence
of hunger. & what is hunger
if not love. What is the soul if not a lighthouse
in the pale sea of my chest, where I am only
a wave folding inwards to reach the shore / Alone,
I dream of motherland. I give birth to myself.
