Tattoos

Since I no longer fit in my name, I carry it beneath my heart, like a relic unearthed from a dead alphabet. It is a cracked word, written in blue ink on the page of a lost Bible in my grandparents' attic. People call my name. But their voices sound like a bell lost in an abandoned cathedral. Perhaps they never learned to utter the syllables of pain in the language I was born from silence. I grew up between walls with cracked icons and elevators that ascended rarely, like tired priests who forget the names of saints. My mother’s heart beat at the door of evening, and no one answered. Our words? Fragments of stained glass gathered after the earthquake. My love was a dog in the rain — with eyes like two unspoken prayers, barking at any light that resembled salvation. I write not to be forgiven, but to be reminded by God that I still exist. My poems are confessions without absolution, prostrations written with fingers on the walls of a clay cell. I never had a room just for me, only the low ceiling of life and a window that cried alone when it snowed with memories. I wrote my first poems on the back of black-and-white photographs where I smiled like a martyr before execution. Receipts from the bakery became manuscripts, and I keep them, like Gospels written in exile. When I was small, I believed God lived in a subway station, where only saints descend and no one ascends except with a verse on their lips. I am afraid of mirrors that ask me, "Who are you?" and of my voice, which has learned to be silent even in prayer. Between a slap and an embrace there is only a held breath. And the hardest thing is to say: "Today I did not cry, but no one comforted me." I wrote to you until my vowels bled. Poetry remained between us like an unfinished wedding — without an altar, without witnesses, only the word "amen" spoken in a whisper. Our love was a fire at the Library of Heaven. Everyone watched the flames, no one saved a poem. And yet, our names smoked between the burnt pages. I did not lose you in one day, but in every day when my name was no longer a prayer to you, but a memory. You left me my heart like a forest of crosses. Poets came to see it — to steal wood for metaphors, and left, forgetting to bow. At its peak, I carried you like a saint written in the language of longing. Everyone read you. But no one knew that each verse was a wound. Now I write with silence, and you, are the most beautiful poem that died without ever being published.