Emily Jay

oh my love

Her body is tells the story of how a landscape can offer a reflective mirror for processing personal and collective histories of negation and reassertion. This is Part Two in the Memory Palace cycle.

The full body of work is available in book form here.

At first

folded, in

and you

(I've found a love like no other)

There was an expanding

an outward

the reach

only make me feel smaller

I'm sleepless

(won't you give me a way out or a place to lay it down?)

like a sign I could not see

(her body is my memory palace)
 

take me

(I used to live here once, you know)

and all of this

I did not know I had started running

you need to lay it down

the worst is yet to come

On the walk home, all I could think was how I wished I could free you.

the bridge

was pulled back up into the sky

taking deep breaths in hidden spaces

and now it's something only we know

(where Gianni slept)

I loved that magic once but I found my own

It's all that matters

and I am

a ghost

this body is yours,

this body is mine

At Last

(it's all inside of me now)
 

for you, I long to feel

(I'll see you when I go to sleep)

When I was 20 years old I first went to Florence. Though she was hard for me to enter into at first, I could sense and see in her all of the nooks and crannies of my mind.  Within Florence all of the dreamings within my soul were somehow laid out in front of me.  And so I pushed forward and finally found myself awake-or asleep-within her dream.  Even when I was not within her, I could feel my skin's edge in her streets. 

And so while I lived inside Florence for so long,
she now lives

inside of me.