By Natalie Keener
No one holds me quite like you. The wind opens your body,
green stalks writhing at the touch, and it all sounds like a sudden
rainfall, one I listened to on my porch as a child, one I ran out into
and I’ve never taken a fuller, easier breath since.
How could I decline such an invitation? The tassels are far enough above
my head to make me feel as if I never was, limbs hovering somewhere.
I hear nothing but leaf whispers, mind light as if it could join
the cloudless summer sky. I bare my throat to the blue, let your sharp-edged
fingers trace the skin and commit it to memory. I submit to you until the breeze flattens
and I am cocooned in thick silence. I settle amongst the deer tracks and damp earth,
allow it to cover me like a second skin, one free of violent openings.
Each breath pushes me deeper into sediment, a different kind of swallowing,
one irreversible, but the light is so tender through all the green, how could I pull away?
Whatever calls my body unlatches, and it is then that I realize I am not bound anywhere;
I could make a home here, endlessly sinking amongst your phantom roots.
Each of my bones begins to liquify and soak the silt cool as silk.
