Oliver tells me god is in everything
we create, doled out in rations. It’s
a private conversation, whispered in
between bouts of hallucinations—
told in store-bought lunch, cheap and coarse
in my mouth, like sand. On October,
the edges of my fingernails start to rip
open. Fragile and pale, the skin learns to live without
the need for the other. I tell Oliver it’s destroying m
e, I am neither the rock nor the river
where god is waiting to be found.
I am in this tear, and in cheap snacks
caked with grime— and words that rise
from under us the way winter’s mist
tends to. Oliver tells me to mend the cracks,
with clay if I must, and listen to the singing.
Living, as a conscious choice, is an act
of creation. My skin will heal come February,
and I will know how to look at wounds as
resealing by December. I’ll be so much older
by then.
