I think I was supposed to wait and instead
I went searching for you through decades
and tangles of terrain. I dug holes for you
and sifted flecks of gold down in Arkansas
before moving on to ancient libraries where
the pages all fell apart in my hands, like
the dust swiped from moths’ wings.

So many places you weren’t that I stopped
being hopeful but kept looking anyway
because the color came on six legs like
my head of hair, richening and fading with
the months. So I looked for years and didn’t find.

When I did find you it was small and quiet.
I didn’t recognize you until the months splayed
themselves out against our hands and turned
into years.

We took our time to grow worthy of exploring
and then realized we had been found.

Light hands thread wool and silver,
duck cloth and burlap,
the concrete and dirt under the wood.

Your bold heart betrays your mouth.
Your chest is a bellowing gong
against your sisterhood-cotton-patch.

Could the river cry to your empathy?
or would you stuck-stay-stubborn
and hard-****** to your unmoved stoicism?

You have the rich-filthy-love I look for.
Truth hearty and sacred like the
sincerity I didn’t believe in before you

showed up creeping toward my front,
announcing yourself as unending,
giving the stomach promise of stay-sure flight.

You’ve thought this adventure was worthless.

Let me tell you about
the heartsick lioness I’ve seen
lurking around corners,
her gut held tight and coiled

ready to spring forth.

I’ve been in the grooves of your headsick
arbor. Your drowsy hands
spinning gold and paper,
delicate moth wing,
cyprus blue heart, pleasing
the eye-mouth-palm,

a skimming quick, stilted
casualty. Apex curve of your
force to my cheek,
rush of fleeting beat,

soft and unkempt night-crier.

In front of you lungs tilt and
brains bubble. A presence
in waves, the slap-thud-skid
of your hopscotch heart

pushing ours to do the same.

“I like natural holidays like equinoxes and solstices and moon phases, because they happen even if no one’s there to acknowledge it.”*

Like the curve of your cheek bracketing a smile
and the elongated hum of your first consonant.

The gait of us takes a fluid shape and the tiny,
joyful bursts of your footfall fill up the
quiet between the words we offer.

You feel like old tradition and new thought
made up to bring the rest of us forward into ourselves.

I don’t dance well but I think I could dance for you.
I could flop back on some
ugly, beige couch with a beer in my hand;
tell you this is all I am for today:

snow on our television screen, ten seconds of song
before I hit next, pacing and sitting, the shift
of my bare ankle searching for yours under a
shared blanket.

You’re sort of everything I could hope for
with a beard of decades and faded tattoos,
like you’ve seen too much sun and rode
a motorcycle too long.

I have this hearsay that says you were a
traveling man who traded your
friendship and your charisma.
(I know nothing firsthand.)

I was a girl once and thought you were
searching for something until I realized
no one ever actually said as much. Just that
you went from here to there and sometimes back.

I wish you could have been seldom rather
than absent. Or maybe rare but at least felt
the pull of my heart enough to pause.
I don’t remember the sound of your voice.

One day we will be dead.

Our daughters will flood
the buildings of power like we
never had the gall or opportunity to afford.

They will bleed on the steps of
civil law and **** along the the stark
black lines of “rules” like pale meat pandering
for sympathy within their own box.

The powder on our faces and the cotton-silk
of our garments will stifle the very licked down,
spit smothered lies they raised us with,
gutting the cage and raising the dead.

What will they do when we amass
like the folds between our legs, bellowing
like the sounds of our *** and forming
in the clean cut lines of blazers and slacks?

Can they get a handle on the heave of our
*******? Can they take the pulse of our
wombs? Out, in, out, in, like the very ******
they aided us with.

How many months in a lifetime do we
have to bleed and clean to earn ourselves
the right to humanity?

Our girls will know more than this;
mark my words. Our children will see
the right they were born with.

We will be free, we will be free, we will not

be silent.