The colored smoke and mist of our ghosts

    is a heavy velvet,

a prayer rug woven from the static of radio waves.

We are the sunlight and water

     to each other’s garden,

tending to the dirt beneath our fingernails

    until the silt

becomes a scripture of blooming things.

I watch you move like a butterfly

      that brings

        the gold-dust of pollen to the flower,

     a frantic, holy commerce.

Your good intention is a spill of mercury

      across the floorboards of the spirit…

            slick, silver, and impossible to contain.

It finds the cracks in my floor,

      seeping down to bring out the next best part of us,

           a subterranean choir practicing for a debut.

We are a hinge, swinging open,

     redirecting our collective souls toward a geography

        of neon and cedar,

where we celebrate our higher elevation

      through the jagged liturgy of art and song.

My ribcage is a harp; your pulse is the rhythm

      of a city sleeping under a purple moon.

Let the frost lose its grip on the throat.

Out of the winter winds,

       the warm arms of spring unfold

like a lover’s secret,

     always awaiting to lift us up…

       not as we were,

  but as the strange, shimmering

metamorphosis that awaits us all,

      where the skin we shed becomes the silk

for the wings we haven’t yet learned to name.

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