– and nights trying to reclaim the missing years in every

 swollen mouth and damp split of skin that stutters across

 my vision my soiled patch of south texas bed sheet my ugly

 sutured lip that still stings like the first time every time whenever

 I taste something oiled and sharp like a catalogue of the terrible

 things done to my body and I still believe resurrection can

 be found in the feversweat of another stranger even

 though the desperate buzz behind my eyes is a wasp’s nest of

 divination and I can see the light spilling out of your

 face like every holy word I wish I’d said and your

 body is a soft thing forgotten and in my hands we come

 to an agreement about each circuit around some distant

 star that aches like dim legend when your skin is a fragile

 egg I hold beneath my tongue to feel every fracture and

 fissure and the delicate pulsation of fledgling wings when your

 body is this egg and this tongue and this tectonic vibration and

 I am singing now full-throated restitution for the years and

 the days and the lives lived in reverse until I can see my way

 toward the light falling upward in the staggering method

 you have of breathing certainty into all this

 confusion and we burn onward into the dawn and –

Natasha Burge is a Pushcart Prize and Sundress Best of the Net nominated writer from the Arabian Gulf region, where she is the writer-in-residence at the Qal’at al-Bahrain Museum. Her writing has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Establishment, and The Smart Set, among others. More can be found at www.natashaburge.com