Ⅰ

my words are printed on inky black sky, wet snow, and foreign ground. my words push and pull.

my words are independent creatures. they want to tear down this new world.

but they do not. this was my gift to this place. heads down. hands shaking.

not the immigrants' language of love: head nods,

hands touching. I have moved to a country in which autophobia and apathy are borders, oars swimming through the endless sky and sea. pushing through the current and never finding an end. when worlds shift, innocence was displaced. remembrance misinterpreted. 

move/on, they tell me. i don't know how.

but my footprints still remain in the soil

of a place that isn't mine.

Ⅱ

beauty isn't just skin deep, I whisper as they stare at my scars.

praise of courage without thought of loss is a type of sick

romanticism, but what i lost is deeper than the bruise

on my left shoulder. they talk about lost loves,

but what is a lost life? what is a world where

humans become numbers erased and retraced

exposed and alone? what is a world in which

a child should never see itś mother again, in

which one takes pleasure in the other´s

annihilation? weapons

aren't always what they seem.

stealing my family

hurt worse than murder.

i remember. I do.

Ⅲ

i remember. i do.

the ashes fallen on our playground,

The distant smell of smoke.

i remember. I do.

tongues laced with desperation.

screaming. running. crying.

tongues laced with silence.

Ⅳ

Itś the first time in weeks that my lungs are weak from laughing

Not from crying. I didn't choose how i lost you.

You were beautiful. You were a star.

now i hold the missing close to me instead of you. i count it’s whispers,

measure its breaths. I donẗ know how to feel or to breathe. two lungs, a heart, throat and ribcage, and our only defense is prayer. in bio, could never answer those questions, could never understand why trillions of cells could not stop one gun, one word, one broken soul.  i sit and wonder and ask and ask, i question the fragility of the human body. my heart broke with another’s end, my soul with another’s body. i’d ask why two had to die for the crimes of one, but the answer lies in a grave.

you were my world before i knew just how big it was.

but my world unraveled two weeks before i left.

Ⅴ

bomb/shelter

questions/unanswered

war/peace

life/death

questions unanswered.