the rain has fermented the roads
leading north into the territory

r.

the hemorrhage spread as if i were reaching
out my hand to you and together our hands
would turn into something
that needs the sun.

it’s easy to believe in god today.

i ate well, saw my children,
cast shade over
a place as small as an insect falling into water, making ripples.

it felt like things were fine. but the world is epileptic.
i saw it convulsing and had to
think obsessively about how she will cut from me today.

not the hands. not my strong and young lungs.

tell me — is love also a kind of amputation?

&

i dreamed i was floating over the sunflower fields
where father never arrived.
in the dream, he still had all his teeth
and the sweet smell of alcohol on his breath.
i smiled. in dreams everything is altered
by beauty and chaos.

&

today i thought of my skin —
like a thin blanket you spread over a wound
so no one sees it.

r.

at the hospital they told me everything’s under control.
they said: the levels are good,
as if life were a chart
someone can read at a glance.

but you know,
inside me there are only bent swords
and attempts to move forward
with numb legs.

&

today i imagined my children in the future,
walking through foreign cities,
holding transparent phones in their palms,
searching
for an old photo of me —
how they might bring me back to life
through a light on a screen.

r.

i breathed deeply.
here in the north, the territories stretch mercilessly
and all i can do is keep moving.

the children are beside me, r. and father.
i no longer know who is sick, r.
but today it’s easy to believe in god.

see — loneliness means nothing compared to
this large and dense forest.
but silence has teeth. in the meantime i thought

of us and wrote.
it snowed softly.
i turned off the radiators.

this whole winter landscape — only haute couture —
where cold and death are mannequins.

and i am a small blue bird
caught by winter, homeless.
my children ask me what it feels like to die.

i don’t answer.
i just listen to the music
and my heart beating above my grass.