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Partition, and Then
We were looking for _______ we found __________.
—Carolyn Forché
The night is an empty basket, and the long journey ahead
promises to be weighed down by hunger, luminous
and wild. As they cross into the newly formed nation,
a child, cargo strapped to her mother’s back, takes the black
sheet of the sky, folds it seven times to make a horse,
then fashions wings for it knitted from thin ribbons of wind.
Inside the brick temple of her mother’s grasping heart,
a burning nest of nightjars, their feathers flecked with both
copper’s shimmer and its blue decay. Their calls are like stones
skipping across the surface of a river. Before the new day
tears open the stillness of her reveries, the girl rests her cheek
between her mother’s shoulders and rolls herself back into
the womb. Inside, the rivers of the newly broken world
flow backwards toward the Himalayas, returning first to snow,
then to cloud. At the first blue blush of dawn, the child
begins to collect the stars, loses count, begins again, and then
again, until sleep arrives and she becomes a white ember of light,
exiled from her sky. In the distance, blindfolded theologians
straddle the gash drawn by Mountbatten’s pen, holding vials
of new blood, large spoons carved from ivory, and honey.
First published in RHINO, 2017
We were looking for _______ we found __________.
—Carolyn Forché
The night is an empty basket, and the long journey ahead
promises to be weighed down by hunger, luminous
and wild. As they cross into the newly formed nation,
a child, cargo strapped to her mother’s back, takes the black
sheet of the sky, folds it seven times to make a horse,
then fashions wings for it knitted from thin ribbons of wind.
Inside the brick temple of her mother’s grasping heart,
a burning nest of nightjars, their feathers flecked with both
copper’s shimmer and its blue decay. Their calls are like stones
skipping across the surface of a river. Before the new day
tears open the stillness of her reveries, the girl rests her cheek
between her mother’s shoulders and rolls herself back into
the womb. Inside, the rivers of the newly broken world
flow backwards toward the Himalayas, returning first to snow,
then to cloud. At the first blue blush of dawn, the child
begins to collect the stars, loses count, begins again, and then
again, until sleep arrives and she becomes a white ember of light,
exiled from her sky. In the distance, blindfolded theologians
straddle the gash drawn by Mountbatten’s pen, holding vials
of new blood, large spoons carved from ivory, and honey.
First published in RHINO, 2017
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