Mayalu Press

Things change all the time

It’s dark and I’m on a plane and it’s cold outside, it’s fall, the last beautiful trees, but right now I can just see the notes of light from the buildings, and the blue-gray strands of the clouds, and the dark. And the music is the old music which has come around, and the new friendship is the old love which has come around. I’m thinking about the woman earlier and her perfect poem and head, and how well it works in the night. My other friend and the stupid fights and the stubborn fondness. Everyone we’ve met who we love now and who remind me who I can be. My perfect complicated parents who love so much with me. I’m thinking about the cold air which brought on the snow, which i heard of and didn’t catch, but the near snow and the last yellow leaves and the little irritations and the being home brought on this warm wind deep dark mood where I feel good and sad and loved and okay, really okay, happy during grief which I’m realizing is going to keep coming around from all directions, somehow I’ve managed to let the weather move through me every day, things change all the time, last week I was scared of my feelings, I was on the bus and I was dying, and today i am flying through the air, I am not afraid of anything, I want to squeeze the hands of my past and future best friend and listen to the new old music, and walk home in the snow-forbearing air and the streetlights and the fallen brown leaves which make me remember being young and home, and love myself and cry and snuggle into bed with extra blankets and dream of good things and I am not scared even if I get nightmares because everything changes, even the air, even the night, even the most certain feelings, even the trees.

– KMN

They were perfect.

They really were and I’m starting to think that is why I never pursued a life with them.
How do you tell someone that even after our hovel burned down, we kept a bit of the fire going to keep our fingers warm?
The houses of your neighbours, the lit doorways and porches still laughing as ours crackled in the moonlight.
Sanuma never asked for help. In the future there is a hospice bed with the hand rests removed, stowed under the covers like mango seeds in Terai’s prairie dunes.
In the past there is a latchkey kid learning to cook alone, feet firmly planted on a teal milk crate
Sanuma sorts medical bills in another room, amused.
How do you tell someone that you once put everything you owned in a milk crate, and still left room
for the last of the stones your hovel’s floor was built with, the surface dull and smooth with years of kitchen clogs and nursing shoes?
When Sanuma lit the fire for our final meal, the hearth and the red clay shone like they always had before.
But every meal is every meal only until there is no one left to share.
Fiddleheads curling inwards like little kids before it’s time to go home
Fiddleheads curling inwards like polymer papers turn to ash and the ash turns to snow.
How do you tell someone
what it means
when a body lies unflinching, only when it rains at night
How do you tell someone
what it means
to withhold
And still be wanted
what it means
To hide and still be seen?

~ཨེ་ཀོ་རོ་ཀན་ཆ་ཏ་མང་།