Long Distance

For Michael

I. Prayer

There, below the crescent of my collar

Above the broad horizon of pulsing skin

Moist and softly breathing, there,

Beyond the swan-stretched neck,

Ear turned for your breath, Michael,

There, my slate of hair shrinks to the

Bend of your fingers, woven,

There eyes taste the serene on your face -

That is where living begins for me,

Where the flutter of your eyelash

Paused all my sighs, where your word

Began its own religion in me, there -

You enclose my world in a single promise.

II. Patience

The city is off-balance

As from the plane’s

Cold oval I see you

Stroking air goodbye.

Snow cripples my view,

White cotton stuffing eyes.

Time steals your scent

From linen sheets.

I carry empty things

To keep hands busy,

Rearrange the bookshelves

Order some photographs.

I’ve color coded things

We do not like about DC.

I keep trying to tell you,

There are no good words

To show what I do

These awkward hours.

III.  Repercussion

When wind pushed against December,

I banked rain in honey jars for him,

Distilled it with a heated breath,

And sent it on its way to Nagoya.

He’d pounded his way against

Locked ribs, bones fortified.

He threaded my time around his ankle, 

Tugged it across thousand dollar oceans,

Conspired red-eye aeronautics

To some island world I’ve dreamt about

In black and crimson semisequence.

It left me on my knees,

Begging for a word.

The author is a junior English and Creative Writing major and a Philosophy minor. Born in Odessa, Ukraine, she fist immigrated to Moscow then United States 12 years ago.