I hold my hands up to the sky & wait for lightning to strike me, after all I have been lying

awake at night, stitched into the side of your name like another bruise left on this body that cannot hold itself up any longer

than the night’s coldness in summer which is when I’m writing this as a way to escape the nightmares of you marrying him

in sacrilegious revenge to God’s humor which is to say my arrogance has left me faithless

in the process of healing

//

I looked to the world running wherever the wind would blow me, crashing down in a thunderclap leaving hollowed memories, ghosts I gave names to, associating them with scars I connect together like a map detailing where I’ve been — constellations to guide me towards the shore & out of the sea’s vast loneliness. Call me a seafarer. Call me yours. Call me anything but lost when I have navigated the openness back to you.

//

When it rains it’s a blessing Grandma says, & so I wade through the downpour as I walk down West 21st. I think about this poem & how I am still writing about the same boy years later, & how the water bathes my skin underneath the stoplight in the same way Judith bathed in Holofernes, how I want to bathe in him. My phone wallpaper says something like I will become as monstrous as I must, & what does that even mean for me? Was it the same for Salome & herdance that made the desert dunes envious of her grasp? Call me Scheherazade, gridlocked with death & in love navigating a thousand & one more storms.

– Fabian Luna