Let’s reinvent geometrical beauty. How weather looks
when painted on a page. How the page hangs crooked
and turns into paper cranes. Here’s you, and the space
between you and my door frame, the space where that doorframe
caves in, if only to shake you up a little, so I can feel your bones
better, ancient, animal architecture. When it’s raining
we are the pages the clouds lick in longing. Rain is really only beautiful
in the moments before it becomes a storm. A storm only looks
at home when it is curled between us like a stray cat on a frayed quilt.
I remember mornings where my father would make me cornmeal pancakes
on a cast iron pan—yellow moons against a sizzling ash sky.
Two people meet and are burnt on the edges.
Light is something the moon only borrows, and likewise,
houses are only lent memories. A house is indifferent to humans,
and yet it is ours. We even make cornmeal pancakes in them,
so a daughter will start speaking to her father again after a bitter battle,
so that we can start the long tradition of learning
how to associate love with devour. To identify sweetness
by the bitterness before. When I make my love pancakes,
it’s not for forgiveness, but because I’m hungry
for more of him. I’ve known how to hurt, I’ve known
the indifference of a house that caves in on those
who plant their memories in it. I’ve got monsters
at my table. Forgiveness and sweetness, salt and insomnia.
This black-hole collision that is all material and only
our negations. I beckon those monsters to my table.
Hungry brothers, I’m hungry too. I welcome them
to leave the storm cloud behind, to hang their coats
to dry next to my door, to wake up lonely with me.
If the monsters are all I have left, I beg of you, please, let’s eat.
