You Speak of Me in Nothing
Jacob Griffin Hall

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I awake in a pool of hieroglyphic sweat and know nothing of baptism.
There is gunpowder on the ceiling.
Murals of bodies etching star charts into windowpanes.
The sound of breaking glass from the hallway, summer chants and gravel-strewn tracks
left partially dissolved into the ocean.

I find an unsettling clarity in those moments when I round a corner six hundred miles away
from our shared graveyards and feel you oppressing my lungs in the most gentle way.
These mornings are humid.
You are of my skin and I dream of abandoned warehouses.
There is sand in my hair.
You glide through the stale air in my kitchen, persistent, refusing to evaporate
or solidify.