• Untitled /15

Children pray late at night when no gods hear their whispers. Silence filled right to the brim with tears made out of blisters.

• Untitled /15

Some many years ago, she was born to a mother and a father who were too old to be in love. They gave her what she knows and what she knows is not enough. So if you asked her what she loved, she would say she does not know. Though when the moonlight shined through those thick curtained windows, her clasped hands rose to her head and she whispered to her heart, “I know you are not there, but living in some elsewhere.”

• mother’s ark /15

borderline six and cheekbones mum dizzy with hopelessness, we flee into the night she’s sick beyond regret she holds me like an anchor

as we storm through this thundering rain wave after wave pelting against us but no ark is within sight, no two pairs hold still against these thrashing, crashing seas

and yet, we crawl out from the storm, out of the waters and still, i see those roses in her cheeks, paper-thin and porcelain how had the colour survived in this hollowed out dim? its light was, of course, saved for the new world

but we are far from kingdom come and though we’re pain stricken, broken, still unspoken of we build our own ark and on it, we sail returning to where we once had fled from

returning to where i sleep in her arms her arms that stretched forever and i can’t believe they still stretch now for her and her and me and even him

on this ark i have grown, learning to know what my mum knows how to stretch my arms up to the abyss between the stars asking

God god good good God spare me a minute? help her and them and me and maybe him