the city is dark, dreary, and dismal
there's no escape from the seemingly never ending cycle
of vicious men committing acts so brutal
every day it gets more abysmal

the sun doesn't shine much like it used to
clouds of hatred and malcontent overcasting it’s rays
fear and anger cloud the skies
an uncontrollable rain is soon to break through

but sometimes a light breaks through the night
pure and bright and keeping you safe
arms wrap around you and hold you close
maybe you could win this fight.

For her eighteenth birthday,
a gift from the fates;
she knows how she will die.
Before, there was a vague notion—
A shadow cast by a hungry dragon
who roosts on the branches of the family tree,
devouring her ancestors, waiting and unslayable.
Now, the diviners speak to her in pedigrees
and punnett squares, leafing through a deck
of tarot cards, checking vials of her blood
for patterns in the tea leaves at the bottom,
hardening the shadows at their edges and
twisting peripheral horror into prophecy,
a promise, and she sees it all,
she sees everything, laid in front of her
and stretching out like a golden string
towards the vanishing horizon:

The sharp burn of dread at every twitch
and missing memory, jellied elegies oozing
from the center of others’ puffed pleasantries,
years spent watching her soul
get thinner and thinner, trapped
within a broken heap of matter and flesh,
cursed bone, misfiring electricity,
eroding endlessly, self destructing,
never ending, ending soon,
and, at last, alone, gazing back on a youth
spent gazing forward, ******, and dying
and derelict, and decades in the making—
she asks herself, what would she not give
for the chance to unknow,
to trade the dragon for the slow, soft lull
of the indifferent stars,
and to die whole and confused,
like the rest of us.

I found religion at the bottom of a cereal box
and ended up saving it in my pocket for awhile, spending my sundays
beside spiritual cannibals speaking of the Supergalactic
and eating on the good word while waiting for the Hand of god
or so-called Miracles; only recently have I discovered
the sacrosanctity of the seed, the egg, the space between matryoshka dolls,
the amoeba before it splits or the amoeba afterwards, baby teeth
and graduates, letters stuffed in pen tips in hands of poets
kneeling with the armless, contrapposto women waiting
inside blocks of marble and boiling pots of Hellenic brass worshiping
in the house of the hesitant spring crawling from the earth’s core
on stolen time;

I say a heretic’s “Amen” to the parting of lips,
the movement of breath, all werewolves on the half-moon and
the moon before the harvest, bless the ant hills full of false gods
that band together in the symphony of the subatomic and glory be
to the Truth! the only truth, that just as all things die in the end, so too
are all things born at the beginning, a fact lost on all those preaching
sacred scriptures in the dead language
of the Impossibly Huge.

Twilight darkens,
And she springs in joy
Of a myriad praises that befall.
She, the Sabarmati,
Flows across the city,
Barely eyed at day, [and
But] Adored as the day would fall.

She spreads like a smile
Across her banks; chaste.
Somewhere she does flow
Into the sea; yet serene,
Like she has always been;
Obscured of haste.

I watch her flow,
For hours and hours,
To see if I’m like her.
Someday when I go,
I’ll be with her;
Like a son long lost
Reunited with his mother.

The evergreens protect us from
the sun, glowing warm.
Our skin is tired.

Our mouths are weary
from talking,
saying the same lies over
until they tumble back over themselves.

Our limbs restless, kicking in the water
at the end of dock,
creating an endless wake.
Watching our towels dry in the night breeze,
and hoping they will be dry enough in the morning.

Long ago we were driven into the
lake by a raging forest fire.
Swimming until we thought we’d choke,
we drowned,
our bodies became islands.

Inlets of moss and forest, sand touched
by ***** feet and berry vines eaten bare,
we cry.

The bluffs our witnesses to all
the yelling and crying,
to all the tears that fell like
lightning bugs in the night.

Glowing softly
when we’d look off the balcony of the house.
The lake reeds wrapping around my ankles,
we search for Petoskey stones hidden
in the sand.

We use the lighthouse to bring us home
resting on the shore of Lake Michigan
as a welcoming beacon,
from the gallery standing
on the hill I can see our lake.

When we leave we bury our hearts
deep in the stones,
far enough under the surface we reach water.
we breathe in lake air and
draw compasses on the side of the lighthouse.

Water so deep,
and so blue, matching the color
of all of the women’s eyes.
We are caught by the water’s attention,
and when we are pulled back

to our everyday life,
we know the lake rests
within us.