SENTENCES
The same sky imaging your eyes folded over me as a perfume’s memory of “wine, pearls and stone” when I received your dream marveling I’ve become “a footnote grown larger than the book.”
The same book you read to excavate me is a fiction I sculpted to soften my marble core, as if—and I still don’t know—words can save me from myself.
The same poem you are feeling your way through is a thin, blue vein dug out from beneath my flesh for the color of a sky breaking into scarlet to set words afire.
The same byline your fingers caress now is text on a page, “which is to say,” yet another tree was axed for you to find the Iron Gate behind which I long hid with uncut hair and wounds as eyes, waiting for You.
—Eileen Tabios
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First printed in Five Fingers Review and forthcoming in THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES (Marsh Hawk Press, Fall 2007)