by Kara Lewis
I counted days, waiting for you to cry so that I could call you baby.
I tell you our love lives in my body, that it feels like being born.
Love lives too long in my body: stillborn, an irritant, like an onion,
acid against sclera. Still, my tears protect me, the way I yearn for strangers
to unpeel me. The praying woman turned from Mecca toward my strange, acid rainstorm
when I screamed on the phone, praying mascara clouds storm your whitest shirt.
I feel holiest in someone else’s shirt, holding a phone while it’s still ringing, or crying in public.
Tears hold the same holy hormone as breast milk. You say you can’t cry, but you stand publicly
shirtless. You say you can’t hold me when I’m like this: Hormonal, unholy, milking
you for some type of mourning. I shoved on a shirt and went to visit the elephants
because I read of their matriarchy and their weeping. Every mother knows a type of mourning like
sleeves through which she can’t reach, like a trunk that can’t close around trumpet or breath.
I reach for you like breath, a sleeveless dress, like everything I would let close to my body.
We counted the wallpaper elephants and waited for an elegy to name baby.
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