First Home/Let Us – by NATASHA BURGE

first home.

 

pinched paper bustling

feathery origami sensation

of doubled and trebled thoughts

scattershot to a thousand distant stars

and it smells like burnt bark

and it sounds like deciduous leaf mumblings

as if the forest of my mind has remembered

the burning heart

of its first home

---

 

let us.

 

i want rumpled pages with frayed edges

like torn lips

and ink splattered margins

birthmarks like galaxies

empty pages like open road

how fast can I write

how many words

will spring up on the horizon

to spread me from here to there

how many words like shrubs like sycamores like cliffs

will rise to scrub clean the sky and block my view

of who I once was

i want pens with sharp nibs and indigo ink

that puddles around every period

so sentences end with a revelation that displaces spacetime

now there are the folded edges of other dimensions

to drag across my face and my body

until my bones exhale their secrets

seeding the blackness between the stars

the frayed edges are buried deep

canyons and wombs and eternities away from here

let us bleed and drink and find our way home

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