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 there I stayed for another seven years, until I was violently pulled from her.
I think, when I was 20, I did not quite know how to love myself. And so I loved Florence instead. I buried parts of myself within her over the years, perhaps knowing that these pieces would rest there until the time came when I needed to see them again. Last year I finally picked them up, looked them over, and put them back within myself.
And so while I lived inside Florence for so long,
she now lives
inside of me.