Expansion

Remember the dinosaurs, giants reduced
to the size of a page in all those books
you pored over? As a child
you knew them all, called the very names
of their bones, remember how you read
and believed they existed
in your neighbor’s backyard? The largeness
of their bodies so easily extinguished
into history, by a simple spark
from space – you always skipped the part explaining
how they died, how everything else arrived
into being: hundreds of species, brambling
bones, muscles, fins, antlers all vying and dying
to fill all the spaces held
vacant by the absence of those towering forms,
how the plates of the earth moved, mourning
this loss the best way they could.
Only the great boulders stayed
still, careful not to break, wedging
all their jagged edges deeper
and deeper into the earth, claiming
for themselves a song, from every fossil
still trapped in their cores, proof
that even the largest things fold
under the simplest of desires:
how the universe wanted more
space.

The Story of Love

A piece of mine got published here.

Go check it if you love me [ctrl + f "alyza" to find it].

Go read the rest of the awesome anthology too.

Hunger

because this is what I call desire:
the strange need to rip you apart
with my front teeth: incisors, we call them
like as if the animals from before would even give

a name to the act that serves
as a prelude to the gnashing
of food (- what we need
to keep us alive) and what do I make of this -

of you, my dear, delightful little delicacy: your eyes
are stars and how you smell like a January morning
so cold yet still a warm body
like a sun, my sun- floating

from invisible threads: held to entice
some hungry, baneful thing
like me, so bright, so beautiful
I imagine how you would explode

within some secret corner kept
in my mouth – my dear, delightful dessert
how you desert me: keeping yourself
in a distant universe.

She said:

let us turn into ghosts; let our bodies fade
into unreliable outlines of fireworks – fleeting
constellations newly-hatched by hope, brimming
from the eyes of people inhabiting

this city. Shining
bright: easily, they will mistake us for stars
before we disappear, wrap
our misgivings in beautiful clouds of dust.

In the Beginning:

We were the only ones left.  

Survivors.

If you ask me, we were just two stupid kids who managed to sleep in the basement long enough to miss it all. We didn’t even hear them disappear, or how it happened. We just knew we were the only ones left. It’s like that feeling you notice picking at your chest when you figured you loved someone. Almost the same, except this one was stronger, and it didn’t make us feel happy.

Now all we had was the mess of the world – a view of the sea reeking of sulfur and selenium, hills made of dust, bones and garbage planted on what remained of buildings, and so on.

From a distance we heard a voice telling us we could remake the world as we wished.

At a price, the quiet voice from the sky said, For each part of the world you want to make anew, you have to exchange a part of your bodies.

As if being the only ones left wasn’t such a hefty price in itself.

—

Everything I write keeps getting shorter and shorter. This was an idea I got while studying the ears and paranasal sinuses for my exams. Strange.

Missive

Suppose the past is a place
dangling from a slew of stars. Imagine
all the faces we used to wear, safely shed
from the present, left to drift

into a constellation curious of the worlds
swirling below it – how would they feel
seeing us, smiling or perhaps sadder,
our faces mere specks to our former selves:

strangers unable to understand, immobile
from doing anything that could tip the fulcrum
of our bodies – trapped in those stars, repeatedly playing out
actions paving way for this moment. I imagine their ghostlike mouths

opened wide, breathing in stardust; nostrils attempting
to comprehend through scent the distant visions before them
as though each tiny piece of space inhaled is a letter
we send to those we used to be.

I’ve said it far too often –

how one day we will be nothing more than bits and pieces
of dust, scattered in the expansive floor of space: wafting

without direction. No heads for looking back, no hearts for beating
syllables of tired regrets or flurries of happiness. The sky above is witness

to these things: the disappearance of skeletons, the slow erosion
of these vessels that cage sadness. Indistinct and no longer weighed down

by memories, the remains of our bodies will swim in a vast, waterless sea
with nothing to remind us of how things other than water (like desire scraping

at our insides, aching with the immediacy of open wounds) can also drown
our bodies. This is the beauty of passing, of turning

into the past – to be as spread out and distant as the brightest of stars,
no longer yearning the nearness between bodies:

and for the last time I will tell you: we are running out of time
to claim this closeness while we still can.

Ophicius

When I think of being forgotten I think of you,
bright bearer of holy serpents. How does it feel

to have your body wrenched from shining
with your twelve brothers, sisters, lover -

by the fickle makings of human memory? Legend speaks
of how you were cast into the night sky just for looking

at the plaintive motions of a snake who dared reclaim its lover
from the fields of the dead, offering the sweetest of herbs,

causing its deadened mate to slither again
into life, its tongue hissing the secrets of death.

Secrets – your attentive ears so easily captured in their eagerness,
your hands furiously concocting the potion intended to save men

from death. Yet all your work was spurned by the gods, unwilling
to permit the existence of anything that spelled an end

to their whims, to their hold on the human body. So you were struck
with the whitest light from heaven, a needle that turned your bones

into stars, stuck you into the blanket of sky. Your only consolation
was that you could look over the people you wanted to relieve

from the coils of their mortality, their heads bobbing like pins
in the distant earth below. And just when you had accepted

your fate – nestled your head into your tiny spot in the universe,
when even the gods who cursed you had turned to stars, voiceless

in their twinkling – those tiny people you had lovingly watched over
all these years decide that now you no longer have a place

among the zodiac. How does it feel to betrayed? Knowing
how you are nothing more than clumped bits of dying light.

Antiself to self

We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

- Stephen Hawking “A Brief History of Time”

Poetry – why are you always so fascinated
with poetry? There is no need for that,
where I’m from. We have no reason
to mourn things. We know so little

of sadness, doors slamming
far too often. My family is kind,
raised me around affection. See,
in this world, there are no shadows.

We have a hundred suns, warming
every corner of the earth. The buildings:
wide and without doors, no reason
to close in on anything, anyone. Everything is open,

this is how I can see you, dear sister self, brimming
with shadows I was spared from. In our homes
we have tiny mirrors revealing things
as they will never be. So always,

I see you: furiously writing
about how there are so few stars
above your dying sky. Your eyes lucid
with thoughts of distance,

the kind no amount of traveling will bridge,
your frail hands, shivering as you write
about the past – how easily it slips through our fingers
like water. Sometimes I pray for the mirror to break

so you can see a sliver of brightness, how warm
our bodies are, how it is possible to live
without some invisible weight tugging at your chest.
If I could, I would pull you away from your poetry,

but at the slightest touch I know we will vanish
into light, so I leave, return
to the smiling faces, find a reason
to explain this sadness.

The sky is falling

The end of the world was at hand and already my friends had succeeded in killing the gods. We ate their hearts and wore their flesh, taking into ourselves their aged powers (half-potent, but power nonetheless) and soon we were shooting arrows at the stars, our mouths were like black holes, drawing the luminous bodies down with booming voices. One by one they fell, scorching the crust of the earth, dividing the oceans like a torn blanket sheared by a child’s scissors. And the angels, they wept – sadder for themselves than anything else, now having no gods to obey, no orders to carry out, having known nothing else but belief – their wings dull, their skin muddied from lamentation. They gnashed their silver teeth and cried like floating rags in the night sky. Down below, believers prayed for salvation to their deadened gods. We felled their altars and churches so they took to forming temples from mounds of soil, whispering their prayers as they built the walls.

Look, my friend says, pointing to the sky.
It is empty, now – we have destroyed the stars.
Now, no one will see reason to believe in the past.

His face lights up, victorious for the end; but I say No, there is still the moon, aiming my arrow at the smiling crescent, the last sliver of heaven.