Azila

Come, come for the mummer's play! To dance and play the day away. See the kings and the queens and the jack of spades. He'll paint you a picture in ...

come hold my hand and we'll hold our breath and pretend we are beached wasps with saltsea sand stuck in their wings who don't yet know why tumbleweeds don't grow ...

someday I'll tell you about the constellations I keep under my bed. how they crumble a little more every night, and how every day I sweep them up and hold ...

out of all the memories, one of them floated long on the surface like a piece of bread that the pond ducks wouldn't eat. it will sink slowly as its ...

there were fingerprints on your hands from all the ballpoint pens you had drained into finely kerned notes until you bled blue and your fingers looked like a giraffe that ...

the sky is smaller than you remember it, eaten away at the edges like maple leaves the year the gypsy moths were rampant and the sugar maple tree looked so ...

a quarter to five in the station. there is a sun rising somewhere above but here there are only sleepwalkers, dragged by dressshoe heels that tick tock tick tock tick ...

today is when you realize that you're translucent. not transparent, not invisible – translucent. you feel like a new glass plate that's not scratched yet; as crystalline as your clumsy ...

there must have been a moment, and embryo inside warm fluid hours painted by a mother's breathing and pulsating with so many tenses (they were all future but only one ...

sometimes stars would fall into our arms when the sky was too big to hold them. we buried them in holes we'd made from between holes in gray woolen socks, ...

The lady bore a daughter in the winter and when crinoline crustaceans hugged the trees, scents condensed under window lace, pepper, mint or coriander boiling the water brown. Snow peas ...

camerashy angels, maybe taught you how to talk (quiver, shake, shatter, mend, like a mirror dropped in a pond) because sometimes your words have halos, and sometimes there aren't any ...

one time I held my hand over my mouth. mute song condensing on my fingers, a quivering pulse like smothering a universe. my feet would run the world, in time, ...

The first one has such wonderful imagery, what with spring (birth) and death woven in to one. "where blue jays catch it in their beaks, spin twice in the air/and ...

I can hear from across the fire escape that you are home. Your voice reaches me, but not your words because they all get stuck on my balcony, somewhere between ...