Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illusion that I opened to at random:

August Gardens

Falling petals and dusty leaves
And drooping flower heads
Beneath unpitying skies
Unpromising of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknowing courage
Meets each day’s mocking sun.

How you keep faith with wind and rain!

I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled tendrils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.

Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?

And here is one from The Upward Pass:

The Gulf Stream

They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bearing the strangest things to northern lands:
Vermilion fish, like flowers, with silver bands,
And bronze seaweed from scarlet coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray monkeys hang by cunning hands,
Follow the thinning blue to northern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.

The while this ardent current chills and fades,
Splendors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of borealic fire,
Each one a spectral ship with rainbow sails,
Sinking and fading as it nears the sun
In this relentless river of desire.

Rowboats on the pond:
random particles
dancing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and himself commanded
them to speak

—and our son, sleeping,
nestles further back
in his stroller, animals,
no doubt, tracking with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the narrative components
bouncing off each other
like these vessels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re honest about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Submission guidelines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a statement if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, corrected for the spacing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider our­selves obligated to perform. In one strand of Jewish mystical tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane, though no less significant level, tikkun olam is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.” Finding my way through language to a finished poem is the act of finding that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to disasters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encompass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Living Waters mission statement is also worth reading:

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else.  An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions.  Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

The poems are from The Silence of Men. Here they are:

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrapping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a current,
a melody gathering words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iridescent fish
bringing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
washing the night from your flesh,
and I cradled your body rising in me
till you were clean, glowing,
and when you surfaced, glistening,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Ethics Of The Fathers

Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
yourselves to goyishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whispered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.

In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
neither god nor goddess, and not a Jew.

After Drought

Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot
rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside,
footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone
does see, what will they have seen? A couple
making love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the coming of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.

In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tuesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew–that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either)–that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Working The Dotted Line

I don’t remember what vacation
I was home for, or how Beth
managed to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apartment to ourselves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hanging crystals
scattering the afternoon sunlight
in small rainbows that shimmied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
nervous along the length
of the daybed’s mattress,
and my fingers tracing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erection.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first condom,
and I’d forgotten to read the directions,
so I stood there growing soft,
squinting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the cardboard open
and sat reading on the bed’s edge,
thumbing the foil-packed
lubricated circle,
trying to visualize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dotted line,
our protection, like a goldfish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was covered with the dust
and small particles of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneeling hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised herself on her elbows,
smiling that the second skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instructions called
the reservoir tip—I thought
of the dams holding water back
in the mountains near where she lived
and what would happen if they broke—
her smile disappeared
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be graceful and accurate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first grimace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
staring wide, her voice
a whisper through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, trying
from the tightness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out anyway,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing downward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I cannot hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve chosen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
holding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a single motion I breathed through
like I was lifting heavy boxes.
She screamed into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing afterwards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My wordlessness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given yourself over?

Who dissolve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stopping place will be provided, what
rest?

Where am I in this emergence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, according to the monotheism I was taught growing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two questions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into themselves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine—and that is, therefore, in itself perhaps the deepest and most fundamental test of faith—who will those people be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that something is emerging—something which, based on the first two questions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clarity another question emerges. What is the speaker’s position in the emergence, not in relation to it, as if he were standing outside of it, watching what was happening, waiting to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places himself within this emergence, who is emerging is no longer clear. The possibility exists in the language that it is the speaker who is emerging, that he is watching himself become, that he has discovered his god within himself, that he has come to accept that he is himself, somehow, within his god.

Questions of faith have been important to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rabbinate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, however, I did not set aside the struggle to come to terms with the final, indifferent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a measure of Kryah’s success that, despite the fact my faith lies somewhere very other than his—and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spirituality—the poems in Glean nonetheless confronted me with the question of just where, precisely, my spirituality does lie. In large measure, the poems accomplish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for example, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”

Breathbloom, the resurrection lily
spent on its stem,

the pale throat thrown back
announcing—what?

Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mistakably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hieroglyph (forgotten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plundered,
it might give up its blank stare, and
suddenly, shudder in my mouth.

We exchange a language
dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recognition, its only response the black eye’s dull circle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
each color offset by the surrounding skin,
the calcite thought of your returning again.

I cannot muster
what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more steadfast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,

a message that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, simply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Sonnet #14, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself thinking of Donne’s Holy Sonnets often while reading Glean, so much so that I read through the sampling of them in the edition of the Norton Anthology that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very differently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes—if I can coin a term—the body, and the physical world in general, to give presence to the absence in the face of which he questions, asserts and maintains his faith, Donne positions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose presence in the world the poems themselves—at least the ones I read—do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Sonnets while reading Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are written in a very free verse—the sentence fragment and the unconventional spacing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two formal devices used consistently throughout the book—his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of language as something physical, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.

In all honesty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not something I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and commitment, the honesty and courage that went into writing it. It is the kind of book I think everyone should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will treasure for the rest of their lives.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.)

Almost ten years separate Born Palestinian, Born Black from ZaatarDiva, and the poems are correspondingly more mature, more subtle, more emotionally complex and more technically accomplished. The anger is still there, but it is tempered by sadness, by regret, by a desire not to have to be so angry, as Hammad says in “palestinian ‘98.”

i did not want to write this
type of poem again poem
places political before beautiful
but swallowing anger burned
a hole in my soul this poem
has kept me up this poem
will not lend itself easy
to revisionist history
nor to sleep

this poem begging to be
beautiful poised
articulate this poem
palestinian and too late

Most of all, though, the anger in ZaatarDiva is tempered by love. Suheir Hammad has written some gorgeous love poems. Here is the last stanza of “whole hands”

and his hands cupped
have caught me as
i fell drop by glisten
fingers coaxing my
arrival whole

Not all of ZaatarDiva hits the mark, though. At times, Hammad relies too heavily on technique. In “land,” for instance, the syncopated rhythm created by her enjambed lines cannot mask the fact that the language goes no deeper into the metaphor from which the poem is supposed to emerge than its rather cliché surface:

his approach
to love he said
was that of a farmer

most love like
hunters and like
hunters most kill
what they desire

he tills
soil through toes
nose in the wet
earth he waits
prays to the gods
and slowly harvests
thankful

Suheir Hammad is in many ways a poetic daughter of June Jordan, who was one of my earliest teachers and has remained a profound influence on me throughout my own writing career. One of the lessons I learned from June was that a poet cannot write political poetry without being responsible and accountable for her or his own position in the politics he or she is writing about. Towards the end of “The Bombing of Baghdad,” from Kissing God Goodbye, a poem that is relentless in it critique of the US bombing of Iraq during the first Gulf War, Jordan writes the following:

And in the aftermath of carnage
perpetrated in my name
how should I dare to offer you my hand
how shall I negotiate the implications of my shame?

In “no cover up,” a poem in which she accepts responsibility as a member of the human community for “what we have/done” to each other, Hammad gestures in the direction of the kind of responsibility Jordan takes in her poem. Jordan, however, takes responsibility for belonging to a specific nation that has committed horrible and horrifying acts in her name, despite the fact that she has stood against those acts with everything she has in her. Hammad, on the other hand, universalizes her responsibility, and while “no cover up” is a powerful poem that speaks a powerful truth, the lumping together of all the atrocities people have visited upon each other throughout the ages into one mass atrocity inevitably dehistoricizes and therefore renders invisible the individual experiences of the people who lived through and died from those atrocities.

Though she was born here, Hammad claims for herself a place in Palestine as a Palestinian—as well she should—and she writes passionately and persuasively in her poems against the dehistoricization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, especially the way supporters of Israel try to represent the Palestinians as ahistorical, but with one exception, which I will get to in a moment, she does not claim for herself a politicized place here, in the United States, as an American, in the way that Jordan does in the quote above. And let me clear that I am not talking here about patriotism or nationalism, at least not in any simplistic sense, but rather about how poets situate themselves in their poetry in relation to the place where they live, the place that formed them as they grew up, the place that gave them the language they use, and so on. She begins to think along these lines in “first writing since,” her poem written in the aftermath of September 11^th

yet when people sent emails saying, this was bound to happen, lets
not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second i felt resentful.
hold up with that, cause I live here, these are my friends and fam,
and it could have been me in those buildings, and we’re not bad
people, do not support america’s bullying.
can I just have a half second to feel bad?

In the stanza before the one I just quoted she talks about “dead iraqi children, the dead in Nicaragua. the dead in Rwanda,” but she does not take on the complexities of what it means to her that she lives in the country she holds responsible for many of the things she writes against, where the aforementioned dead “had to vie with fake sport wrestling for […] attention.” Nor, frankly, does she have to. It is neither my place nor my desire to tell Suheir Hammad what kinds of poems she should write. The ones she has written stand on their own and speak for themselves, but it is precisely because they do so with such power that I am interested in what she would make of the complexities I just talked about, and that is why I bring it up here.

Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque is, as I said, a very different book. Quiet and introspective, it takes you on a journey, that begins in “the desert [where you came], illiterate, spirit-ridden/intending to starve” (“Gallery) and ends in the graveyard where “the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me” (“July”). What happens in between the intention to starve and the becoming of that which the sky can drink can perhaps best be described as a search, though the terrain of the search is internal rather than external. Indeed, the terrain outside the speaker’s interior landscape is represented primarily through allusion and the transformational power of metaphor, and is often refracted through the pieces of a fragmented and broken syntax that Ali weaves nonetheless into a music that is quite moving. These are the first four lines from “Agnes Martin”

Wetten to work here seen against the sky sandscape sandbox silent
Alone mind unleashed mouth a close open cave stone breathe
Stone whiten away sharp sky edge dusk blend down dark self edge
Thrown aloft five birds little surface wind lettered and fettered

I will not pretend to know what these lines “mean,” but there is something about the rhythm—no word has more than two syllables—and the alliteration that carries an emotional meaning in much the same way that a melody line does. Then add to that the fact that parts of each line—“Alone mind unleashed mouth,” “Wetten to work here seen against the sky,” “dusk blend down dark self edge”—read as if they were sentences pared down to the bare minimum and you have an impressionistic word-melody-portrait of what it feels like to be alone and feel yourself become one with nature.

I read The Far Mosque immediately after I finished ZaatarDiva and I was struck by what I saw as similarities not in the content of the poems, but in their technique, and this intrigued me. I have always found it unfortunate when writers, or artists of any sort for that matter, mistake technique for ideology or essentialize any given technique by insisting that it belongs irrevocably to any given ideology. Much of the free verse vs. formal verse debate, and all of its various permutations, has always seemed to me to be rooted in that mistake. Anyway, it struck me as I read The Far Mosque that, in terms of technique, there wasn’t much difference between these lines from Hammad’s “glitter girl”

know how a mirror breaks
seven years bad luck
breaks into shards sharp edge
glitter like blood
if you touch it
bleed bad luck

that’s what happens to girls
too when they get touched
get broken they break
i broke
into shards flowers into thorn
sharp edge pretty
blood and all

And the lines that I quoted from Ali’s “Agnes Martin” above, which I am going to relineate so that my point become clearer:

Wetten to work here
seen against the sky
sandscape sandbox silent

Alone mind unleashed mouth
a close open cave
stone breathe

Stone whiten away sharp sky edge
dusk blend down dark self edge

Thrown aloft five birds
little surface
wind lettered and fettered

My point is not that the techniques in the two poems are identical, but merely that they echo each other: the same paring away of articles and other function words, the same jamming together of words to create meaning through juxtaposition, the same grouping of rhythm and meaning into two and three beat units. And yet the poems themselves are so radically different in so many ways—though I suppose it is also possible to argue that the poems echo each other in terms of substance as well: each book is in some way about a search for wholeness, though Ali’s is much more explicitly spiritual, while Hammad’s focuses more on the physical and political.

Most of the poems in Ali’s book are less obscure than “Agnes Martin,” and several are ghazals or variations on the ghazal form, or they make use of the free-associative discontinuity that is one of the conventions of the ghazal form. Indeed, the whole book can be seen as a meditation on the relationship between unity and discontinuity that is at the center of the ghazal form. Since I have been for the past two years translating classical Persian poetry, I found this aspect of The Far Mosque delightful and intriguing and so I’d like in closing to offer you the poem “Rain,” which is the poem that comes closest to following the rules of the ghazal form:

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.
No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:
“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.
The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.
If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.
The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.