nica bengzon
Bookends Sometimes I think it isn’t the words we fight against, but their impossibility, that which clatters down through our fingers into gaps in the floor. I’m told silence is the world’s gift to girls with tight lips and austere eyes — the truth is, too many words going unsaid is nothing to smile about. You and I tire of ink – constellations, blossoming dark on the sides of our hands. Tell me about yourself. Write me a letter, if we can’t find it in ourselves to write poems. You push a piece of paper across the table: Here are the things I have no names for. My brother’s eyes. The cracks in my roof, the rain that there collects, how I shut my ears against drowning in the sound. My mother’s hair, touched by a sun I’ve never seen. I answer: A warmth, morning coffee and fresh bread. What it means to listen to the sea roar from inside a shell.
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