Prem Sylvester
We Have Lost All That We Found
We first heard love as a slur, a tongue of storm.
In the liminal space between death and death,
our parents read their vows, sandpaper-throated
& we weep for it. We were forged in detritus
come before furnace. Do they hear us break?
My mother makes whips of my father's failings,
& all my memory is the silence lashed onto him.
Your father's rage echoes in your mother's sobs,
& the salt of his violence is wet on your shoulder.
Home pockmarked our backs, stuttering into cacti.
When I sought your faith in us, in tattered love,
what vines bound your lips, that I heard no promises?
what burrs dug into your heart, that welted our time?
My mother's words throb in me, glassy in the miasma:
ruin is my blood. I am the man she loathes, antithetical.
This is our nadir: ribs as cage, fingers as scissors.
We loosen our threads with hands not our own.
Old shadows eye us, fulfilled, touch a twilit myth.
Oculi collapse into now. Death is party, not witness.
We are flames untwinned. We have lost all that we found.
In the liminal space between death and death,
our parents read their vows, sandpaper-throated
& we weep for it. We were forged in detritus
come before furnace. Do they hear us break?
My mother makes whips of my father's failings,
& all my memory is the silence lashed onto him.
Your father's rage echoes in your mother's sobs,
& the salt of his violence is wet on your shoulder.
Home pockmarked our backs, stuttering into cacti.
When I sought your faith in us, in tattered love,
what vines bound your lips, that I heard no promises?
what burrs dug into your heart, that welted our time?
My mother's words throb in me, glassy in the miasma:
ruin is my blood. I am the man she loathes, antithetical.
This is our nadir: ribs as cage, fingers as scissors.
We loosen our threads with hands not our own.
Old shadows eye us, fulfilled, touch a twilit myth.
Oculi collapse into now. Death is party, not witness.
We are flames untwinned. We have lost all that we found.
Biography
Prem Sylvester (he/him) is a writer from India who turns into words the ideas he catches a whiff of from time to time. Sometimes people read these words. His work has appeared in Parentheses Journal, Rabid Oak, Turnpike Magazine, Royal Rose, Rising Phoenix Review, and Memoir Mixtapes among others.
Twitter handle: @premsylvester |