after the rain

trees flex their weather-hardened limbs wild irises swoon at the sight the hummingbird makes a meal of a bleeding heart and mine skips to the gentle hum of you

- Cora Finch

“Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing

— Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena (via lumamonchtuna)

The cosmic reverb of a kiss can be felt one hundred lightyears into the future where it is printed on the wings of a monarch whose flutter topples a stack of dominoes that cause a record player to skip and everyone scrambles for a seat but we are the last two left on our feet and we do more than make the best of an awkward situation we click a pair of satellite souls suddenly thrust into each other’s orbit effortlessly synchronizing and softly spinning into a series of small steps that swiftly amount to a giant leap deep into the uncharted waters of a unified verse where all the stars have aligned and gravity loses its hold and somehow we still fall.

- Cora Finch

Sara Teasdale, from The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale; "Song,"

The one where I confess that I am unapologetically soft

how my heartbeat mimics the wind, invisible but far-reaching. With gossamer fingers I braid my hair, brew the tea, knead the bread. On obsidian nights, I gather dried lavender and listen for the willow. I have cradled newborn heads on the crest of my collarbone patched wounds with rose petal kisses, unwound the deepest of aches with worn-out denim and bare skin. I have carried the dead, cried my weight in tears. I am soft, and my hands are small but I would hold the sun for you, blister ‘til you no longer wish to be a burn. I am soft, and my voice is softer. It was made to breathe poems into the scruff of your neck to lay the ghosts of your worst fears to rest eternal. I am soft, and we are only a moment but my love will linger long after the willow stops weeping.

- Cora Finch

after the naked

grief, we dress each other’s wounds in skin, bare

the raw comfort of release and bask

in the promise of wilder days to come

- Cora Finch

in a dream there is a voice without a face and a body void of bones that I come home to—or is it a house without walls only open windows and doors which perhaps is just another way of saying a heart without a cage does it even matter in this dream words have no matter because you have all the answers and I have no questions only a kiss for your mouth one without lips until I kiss it I kiss your lips as though they are air and you hold me like an inhale that does not want to be exhaled

Mary Oliver, from “Summer Morning.” [ID in alt text]

.🦋.

🔸Ph. Eric Rose

Portrait of a Flightless Bird

Let me tell you how I clawed for the quiet steady purr of an honest love. I made myself at home in cramped spaces, napped in transient windows of evening sun. But every night I dreamt I was a gale coasting clouds and molting feathers that dispatched like lost letters: Return to Sender Everyone leaves, but I stayed long after the birds stopped singing.

- Cora Finch

between the hours of blood rush and burnt coffee our little universe e x p a n d s

for a time we choose to ignore the allotment of quiet light where shadows sometimes bloom into half-truths. the stress fractures bedframes withstand while cradling our restless desire. the secret lives of tongues, teeth, and gums condensing twenty-six letters into just two. then one. the inert friction of tumbling heart-first into utter unknowns. the soured morning breath of regret

we prefer to overlook. we scatter pieces of ourselves across the thicket of apartment floors. we answer the ache in our bellies with hips that do not question. fumbling fingers string pearls of sweat onto spinal cords, waistlines, and necks. jelly wobbles the hollows of knees. we make shapes with our mouths that do not resemble the last impression we had of each other. we let the shushing of sheets lull our tangled bones into stillness. we make sense of everything. until there is nothing left to do but feel for the edges of the sun and push back.

- Cora Finch

once in a solar eclipse

I don’t spoil every kiss worrying that it’s the last

you tell me the truth and it does not hurt

we savor moments like sips of sweet tea in the summer

the sun is the perfect shade of marigold

I wake with the thought of you on my chest

and the heaviness is gone

- Cora Finch

slept some | still me

dozed once or twice in the back seats of cars underneath the bridge of his arm curled up with sick on the bathroom floor benched at bus stops headed for some stranger’s shoulder shattered parts blanketed with newspaper stars on a remote island with only the weight of this world for shelter

slept some

morning comes— still me

- Cora Finch