Earth, I’m trying
Do you see the dirt under my nails?
I’ve been weeding dreams.
Here on earth, time belongs to the tides.
The other shoe dangles.
A dark heat of reckoning.
Holding my breath, I dive deep into the nameless.
I want this so much.
G Train, 2005
Across the steel tracks, a rat weaves in and out of city life.
Receipt.
Empty bottle.
Plastic bag.
A hot shot of wind
And I come to.
Please stand away from the platform edge.
We move closer.
Can you not see through the anodyne haze?
We cannot.
A yellow verge separates us from an abyss of syncope prayers and certain death.
And yet, I know.
On this relentless platform.
Inhaling unforgiving decay.
Exhaling a bird flight to the moon.
I know.
This is where I am supposed to be.
Until the next stop.
Cádiz The sun is honest here, in this sanctuary of longing, a maze of grottos and peeling past. And yet, I cannot know you. Light, heat, a stranger. Cádiz, you are all those things. But mostly heat. I taste your millenary salt on my lips. My cuts sting. It's night now. Shoes pierced with nails bleed staccato through smoke corridors. At high tide, azabache waves fall over your brow. I overhear a love story of seafaring Phoenicians. Day breaks, and I feel them buried deep under me. Could I stay if I lay under your streets next to them? But you can never belong to me. You can never belong to anyone.
*****
Crystal Harlan Niforos is an editor, translator, poet and ceramicist. She holds an MA in Spanish literature from Saint Louis University, Madrid, and currently resides in Florida with her husband and two children.
