death makes a person mythic. every myth has cracks.
that’s where the grief leaks thru when you remember
the beautiful ordinariness of a person. then you lose them
all over again. myth is easier. the mundane fades each time
you recall it. a rose loses its scent each time you return to it
to steal another moment. each moment a broadcast into the ether.
a game of telephone btwn you and eternity.
until the gps leads you into the forest and suddenly you can’t breathe.
to which tree do you nail the memory for safekeeping?
hard to choose. do you look into the bare face, warm and blemished
or the one contoured by the silent cinema of night, its retraction
of sunlight so that everything is shadow containing depths i feel
but can’t prove. why can’t i hold you
the way a watch holds a scent
the way sun cleans a stone
or warms a ring around my finger—
metal tightening and my blood
rushing to meet it.
your voice is in everything i hear. the same way
each raspberry print on the lip of a coffee cup holds an iris
staring back at me. your eyes bore thru everything i say
and pigment fading the more i keep saying. until your eyes
are inoculated by poetry. until your eyes from inside a dream
stare back into mine from the face of an eagle talons tight around my wrist
and i’m shaken awake— i know what to do. it’s laughable i ever didn’t.
catholicism made us walk til our feet bled, evoked in our phantom
limbs the compulsion of nails into wood to make a memory eternal.
tens of thousands martyred in palestine. just like jesus.
phantoms separated from their limbs but their eyes eternal
warmth on our backs as we step out into the harsh light
of day which clarifies and calcifies the mission
and i’m reminded flesh melts away but bones hold
their carvings. a set of instructions. you are written inside
of me as long as i keep moving. i’m sorry i tried to implicate you
in a poem abt trees when there are cops among them
and shit to burn down.
Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese writer and visual artist. Her book the magic my body becomes won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab American Writers. Her zines include IF LUV IS A CHEMICAL SO WHAT WHO CARES, and ANYWAY.
