While listening to an author recite her latest poems, I become infatuated with her voice, with the magnetic vulnerability made lyric by her art… how the courage to reveal herself turns the words she speaks into a lure of song.
It leads me to think of how we often talk to one another in clipped sounds, words spilling out of our mouths like tiny snowflakes that float slowly in the air, appearing as if they are too weightless to ever reach the ground.
Just last night I sat across from you, watching you eat, wanting to discuss something that seemed to lodge in my throat, remain there hidden and throb-bing like a piston pumping inside a stalled, idling car.
As I listen again to this poet read from her works, I am drawn into the deep, wet portals of her almond eyes, realizing that they are opened like wings fully outstretched in flight, and immediately I understand that I have not yet learned how to fly.
This was originally published in Spring 2018 edition of The Helix.
