We are not dying // Adella Barret You live on the eleventh floor
of a building that sways in the wind,
in the middle of a ravenous city. (See how the concrete and steel never lose their appetite for the green and the soil).
You stand at the open window
with a cigarette between your lips
sucking poison into your lungs, breathing a gray river out into the summer heat.
You were a child once with soft tiny hands
that reached only for your mother.
You choked on the absence of a father,
grew up on wonder bread and electromagnetic waves from the television, and were told not to talk to strangers.
There is not enough space for your life in this room,
there is not enough space for your reverberating questions and feverish desires.
The city is only building up, the space is only thinning. A prison, you think to yourself, home is a prison. This morning you woke up crying and you could not stop. “Where am I?” you asked the ceiling,
but your words slid back down your throat unanswered.
You lie down on the floor beside the open window, the sound of sirens pounding in your temples,
your hands clenched into fists pounding the wooden panels.
While the noise of traffic shreds the air into chaotic phrases,
the neighbors upstairs rock the bedframe back and forth
seeping the pulse of life into your atmosphere. You imagine their fingers gliding along each other’s spines,
you imagine their body heat rising and the song of their breathing.
You unclench your fists into two opened palms and begin to laugh. You laugh. You laugh. Listening to the prayer of the lovers. You laugh. You laugh. They are making love to survive. 39