the last time my brother travelled, he told me his body became a mirror where he sees fear as an aftertaste of flying.

He says, ” I’m sick of all the breaths I lost in my lungs, I’m sick of water letting me drown in it. then, I recover how he covers himself in his skin, how he wishes his home, is not a burnt skin.

Now, I learn to call nostalgia as a rejuvenescence, a revival, a poem going back into his body, as memories and as water.

my brother pronounces home, as a poem, dilapidated from the metaphors on his tongue, how he recollects himself into his skin, learning to love his past and how he covers his body with longings for days dead.

My Home, Is Not a Cadaver of Roses

that I write about grief doesn’t mean my body is a steel, I, glass. This poem opens from the footage of a CCTV capturing how a poet was kidnapped. I recite them into my nerves as stanzas dying, as verses learning the language of survival.

Sometimes, I ask if God has a voice, because a poet is God’s way of creating beauty.

a newspaper headline carries the obituary of a boy burrowed with a body bulleted, I wonder if it means my home is a hymn, a symphony. I firefly, I rose, I call this home a baby learning how to crawl from death into breath, how the mothers in this home are poems learning to write off worries that hung in them.

I know my home is not a cadaver of roses, because one day, a poet kidnapped will be freed, and God’s voice heard, a bulleted boy will learn to whole the holes in his body and a mother will one day learn the languages of joy and this home is/will be a garden I learn to tender just as I tender the griefs in this poem.

Breaking

they say you need to break into years of dust before you crawl back into yourself, I burgeon my body into wraps of refrains.

They say a poem is how we look at the sky and pluck stars, I carry myself into fireflies morphing themselves into oxygen, water and everything lucid.

I find no peace and all my wars are done.

I fear and hope, I burn, I freeze. – A poet

I break into wits and into days I run into things clinging to the past, a bildungsroman, a poem, a canvas painting my body into itself, an ode to nostalgia, and a poem resuscitating into a butterfly.