But wrapped up in
the sounds of
blaring sirens,
radiators bellowing heat,
the emptiness of each room,
the hush of isolation,
I don’t feel welcome.

Thin walls,
Holding me in
Doors locked from the outside world
All lights turned up for false safety
I glare at the blank TV
Sitting,
Unable to make myself move
Hollow of feeling
other than loneliness.

Lay myself down on the mesh of burnt orange and brown
Cloak my arms around my body,
inhale the aroma of a stale apartment
that doesn’t smell like home.

We spend our first nine months in
small sacks of transparent, rosy
membranes and indigo-blue veins.

Floating in the fluid darkness,
we breath in time to the beat
of waves rising and breaking

rushing in and out of unseen chambers
of the heart. Existence is a pulsing communion
with God in the ebb and flow of silence

before we wash ashore on the dry banks
of the canal and learn to scream.
My nephew was born small and wrinkled

into latex gloves, with fluid in his lungs.
Brushing my pinky against his petal-fragile
skin, I think of the tides and

the people who return to them with
stones in their pockets, surrendering
to the crashing of salt and heaven

as the first mother fills them
in an inversion of that Egyptian
myth of creation—a small piece of the world

sinking back into Nu’s cold embrace
—and something old and fiercely bright
rises up, overflowing into my smile,

hot and sweet. My eyes burn red against
the late November air as the origins of love
wash me clean.