once i whispered you a promise of perfect memory;
you scrawled it in the desert sand, let the wind take the words
from my lips and told me i could not outrun my mortality.
i remember this in place of your face, a broken piece of us,
and i wish on every star you have forgotten our ending.

offer bones to the darkness and the backs of your eyes
so you might be blind to leaving, my love—
will you remember my eyes, last,
then close yours and let the lines fade into a night sky,
let it disappear as if it never happened?

and this is not a goodbye poem,
it is not a dirge or final penance poem,
it is a love letter to time that wore me to weeping marrow.

the universe is shrinking again, hamshira.
it is too full of heat and chaos—
don’t you feel it in the bombs, the beating
of the earth? she shudders in her sleep, hamshira.
she will shake us to pieces,
hamshira,
she will shake us to dust.

and this is not a goodbye poem,
it is not a too little too late poem,
it is not a dying declaration or graduation or celebration
of rebirth.

did i tell you, love? we have a velocity of 1674.4 kilometers per second.
the earth cradles us, her still-warm stillborn, close to her chest,
praying that we will see how she breathes and realize
we did not need to scream until our lungs shriveled with absence.
we are in her every step. but love,
how do we catch glances when our eyes move so fast?
how do we stand when our skin sinks to kiss gravity?

i am not poetry; all my scars have faded, chavera.
why don’t we carve more with the empty shell casings in the street?
let’s dance through to dark morning, chavera, when moonlight
turns us translucent and we can read
all the places we’ve been in the naked bend of our bodies.
chavera, when you bury me, curl me like an s
so i can make plural the stories folded in the earth’s flesh;
we are each a letter in history and i am hanging on the end of a finished word.

and this is not a goodbye poem,
not a suicide note or sunset namaz poem,
it is an elegy for all the things i dreamed were meant to be.

we are pitted like the moon, love.
don’t you see where the sounds of god scorched in the rockets
has hollowed our eyes? it’s getting louder, love.
my heartbeat is subdivided in explosions, love.
but the light is quick enough to blind you to the end,
and i hope it comes to you first; i want to forget
every kiss in my fingers before i’m gone.

and this is not a goodbye poem,
not a hail mary or unwritten poem,
it is a waiting drought and bone-dry riverbed,
it is amazing grace before you are dead.