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Gravity

I reread your letter & your voice
dives into my ears like shooting
stars. Words frozen, punctuation
marks like walls of a citadel.
The historic walled city where
you sketched me in a centuries-old
cathedral. I held the rosary we'd made
from old broadsheet newspapers.
The sweatier I got, the more
the beads around my wrist warped.
All statues without heartbeats,
staring at you. All motionless,
rendered livelier by their staring.
Centuries ago, Newton stared
& witnessed a heart fall
out of the blue. An aged brick, separated.
A bead detached. You’d never age
another year older. Everywhere,
the devout kneeling down on marble
pavements, saying rosaries, breathing
without you. & I, too, alive,
praying, remaining motionless
to adore the voice the way I did
the woman, spaces like dust from space. 

Unattended

Let’s say I’m the child in the cover
design of a dusty poetry book that sits
somewhere on your shelf, examining
the road after the rain through
a pair of paperback eyes, wet wind
stroking my hair, as if to say, You
long for your mother’s lips

& fingertips. Watch as my shadow swims
in a puddle, an invitation to press your palm
against the phantoms of my past.
I touch the only rock that can be seen
in this scene, the former tenant in my father’s
left chest. I taste its careful cuts calling
for caress. Elsewhere, my father, still
asleep, places his paint-stained hands
on his breast, dreaming about
his daughter discovering his heart.

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Jessie Raymundo © 2024