I have become a country
people leave at night,
suitcases packed with borrowed breath,
passports stamped with might-have-beens.
The sky keeps folding into smaller squares
until it fits inside a locket—
the one my mother wore when fever
turned her garden into salt.
I am learning the architecture of absence:
how doorways remember what passed through,
how silence builds its nest in abandoned bells,
how your name has become a room I no longer enter.
Each winter, the geese reverse their arrows,
rewriting the sky’s ancient manuscript.
Even their certainty is a kind of faith:
north exists, and so we must.
The archaeologists of tomorrow will find
my ribs curled around nothing,
excavate the empty museum where I kept
all the artifacts of almost.
Memory is a climate we cannot predict—
droughts where once were floods,
hurricanes in deserts, ice where fire bloomed.
I’ve become my own strange weather.
Yesterday, a child asked why the moon
follows her home each night.
I wanted to explain how loneliness
becomes devotion if you give it enough time.
The calendar on my wall is quietly
eating its own months. December
feeding on April, September
swallowing May. Soon there will be
only one day left, unnamed and endless.
I have grown wings on the insides of my hands.
They beat against my palms when I make fists,
a private migration no one sees
as I cross borders visible only to me.
