like the sky I’ve been too quiet

I sit in the forbidden room      a chair by your bed    holding my weight in stones, in sorrows in uncountable grains of touch you can still speak  so I lean over to catch   your voice in my mouth to swallow these        bits warm               in beak  and you tell me I was always the quiet one  and you don’t know about all the words layered in me              like rotting leaves  so many things I have said inside the cavern of my chest full of nervous screeching   bats flitting around   while  things I don’t say pile up   light   cuts across your blankets and I am afraid to touch you because you are a pillar of pain     and this is the bad thing this is the moment I remember and write over and over and over always that light and my own body screaming from every rivet    I promise now   to go over      the years to scratch the earth of your love   for me  to erect those landscapes eclipses rays       shimmering like milk  in sky   —so I say— but this poem   goes down the same   mournful path and     out the window              blackbirds have come to eat what I have  scattered on blurred  and foggy     ground                                       


                            *from “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)”
                                 by Kaveh Akbar

Crab Creek Review
2018 Vol. 2