for the gaping quiet

 I fear the silence of life more than of dead things.

 The sky opens, and pours blue serum into my loneliness

My mother; hope in a gown, curbs  her fear of the dark

Into her chest—the best place to hide a bad memory is where the darkness resides.

The best place to be light is where the darkness leaves you. My father is a home for angels that lost   their way through the storm, my father is the place the earth paused for resuscitation, my father is all the people the war ate and communally tagged heroes.

           I’m by the side of a river,   Carrying all the emptiness and pouring us dark-milky syrup into the palmar crease of the Nile

I swear this isn’t holiness.          I swear I do not seek validation that much.  I swear the day the flowers bloom my body would not succumb to the rhythm of the terror; the silicon silence; the gaping quiet slowly eating through the night, eating through my mothers biggest fear—death.