Issue 9.1 Fall 2013

9.1 cover image

 

 

Untitled

 

Summer Qabazard

 

 

The excitement was generating an immediacy as the expression of her face faded away from

the city at night. I wanted to get up and look for answers. The words were out in the open, but

my real questions were un-asked. The plane landed at dusk. The memory sat, eclipsing the last

light of day.

 

Voices that make dust retreat. Voices drinking that night, uncertain of their own movement came

cool down to hours. The human habit of viewing stars was on us. Furnished with a thousand

faces and colors and forms, a kiss at her cheek. Mixed colors trail the plane. When I heard you

were married, I fell to the floorboards and wept myself into a ball.

 

The people we’ve lost lie in ashes, their bodies, empty sources whose words were vanished or

ignored. Violence is a network. I find no way to shut it out.

 

I smelled the one-pint bottle for the last time, eye-level with a capacity for wander. I did not know

the day white with clouds. I walked where the dark fields of the air as a flavor lay. I stood

balancing on electric light. I remembered the dazzling lights at the front steps, the music in her

garden. I danced of distance, of cornflowers. Toward dawn, I heard meadows. I jumped onto the

path. In the morning, the airplane leaves.

 

This is all starting to feel sick when you touch, and I’m just watching you. Leaking
tones of turquoise turn in me as I try not to feel the wrong verb. Something in me is blanching

former colors of itself. Why do I want you? You talk too much anyway.

 

We stood under our stars and talked for a moment about love. We took in each other under the

color change of the skies. You held onto me like a cat in the ocean under the night. The quiet

room was really a moment’s fix. I grind the plant and plant it to bubbles. Wave after wave, the

passing cars remained blank. The smile you saved for me was lost.

 

No words came through your unhappy eyes as you came out of the house. It had stopped

raining and was blazing with light. I celebrated seeing your eyes with words full of love, hoping

the warmth of them would stir a glisten. I ached with your beauty, but didn’t know the grief

reasons. I reached into the strangeness of the silence and brought our bodies together in further

attempt to break into the sadness I didn’t understand.

 

I sat lightly resting in your voice. Resting in our beautiful white memory. I wish you were treated

better. I stood in your doorway and we saw the last of each other’s faces. Bags of words hung

between us, untouched. The roof jingled with snow as I warmed to touchskin by the fireplace.

Lying near the flames, I called your touch back.

 

I had no language to name the moment. You loved me once. Turning with the earth in the dark, I

lay in bed again. The memory was a fairy smell and I couldn’t grasp it as I stared at the glow-in-

the-dark stars. I lay in the vanishing sounds I know I just heard.

 

 

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