Sofia
Kamal

I have lived around the corner from the houses of jinn,held collapsed stars in my hands like I could reopen them.

Outside, the street is littered with acorns and the bodiesof dead parables—tell me, do you know where to lay a hurricane

to rest? The old women who interpretednightmares and the migration patterns of birds

died last Thursday in her sleep—collect azaleas, minorkeys, other debris of this life. All things return home—

pollen born of dahlias and the last syllableon your tongue, a night sky with exit wounds.

The whispers of wind chimes cling to the morningand the bronze I broke off the edge of the sun. In the garden,

the honeyed insides of figs are sunk into earthto wash over all the death held in this soil.

Look, I couldn’t tell you what the blue jaysgrieve, only that they live, so they must

mourn. And I recognize in fire its hungeror love, maybe I felt that once

in a dream I don’t remember now. It was adream of nightjars and a grove of sequoia trees

and other omens of danger. I wake to the sea,brimming with salt and sleep, mottles the shore.

The sound has slept long years inside the mouthsof bells, and I want to coax it out, the way blood longs

to leave these veins or these scraps of language settle in dense air.No one sees the bullets streak the sky softly in the dusk,

and every unanswered prayer, splintered on broken clouds,returns to these hands I hold out for your name.