Maybe the city finally folded itself

into the long green hill, or the flat lands—

the roads at last surrendered to rain,

the banners sad, forgot the names

we stitched into them by lantern light.

When I remember the dock, I no longer think about the person I was trying to escape.

I think about the woman sitting quietly among the reeds and lilies, listening to the water, unaware that she was practicing for the rest of her life.

bottega | 02.2026

Our grandmother in her seventies,

bent to the thistle, tugging,

the sun hammering the desert

into its final making—

and her, still prosecuting weeds.

The Reason . . .

It sits in our silence.

A hum so low in my pocket,

A note uncaptured in the air.

The truth is that I had to reclaim my life. Nobody was going to do it for me. So I returned to the things that have always sustained me. Visual art. Books. I filled my home with beauty.

But I keep returning to one

who hides her whole year

as a dead thing —

thin stems, grey as death,

unread against the creosote

until the night opens her

like a secret kept so long

it became her sex’s secret.

There is a bird that keeps its song

past the falling day —

not because of its courage

but because it has forgotten

what the silence means.

Come and take what's left.

I am now awaiting you.

I have been practicing this

my whole life.

What we abandon doesn’t sit waiting. It simply becomes someone else’s memory, or no one’s.

At some point you start to think you're the problem. The only consistent variable is the one doing the choosing.

The earth dances.

I know this.

I watch it from the edge

where I keep going back

to see if this time

the thing in the wind

is something other than

the thing in the wind.

VI.

There are creatures —

I can scarcely hold the full weight of it —

who hate the very vessel

that cracked open

and gave them their first breath,

who take the compass of compassion

a woman pressed into their chest

and use it to find their way

back to her throat.

Perhaps you are already here —

wearing a white man’s clothing,

your eyes no longer black

but blue from a ransomed country.

As I am poured

into a white woman’s skin,

my eyes gone green

with the translation.

And I will sit beside the open window

while dawn unbuttons all its dreadful light,

feeling my life drip slowly through the hour

like rainwater escaping through a crack.