Before the Beginning

There’s a picture of you (right before the beginning)
head on your arm, heart in your hand.
Your pupils are blown and I can see myself
seeing you,
watch my fingers stretch toward that open palm.

I remember that moment, taste the blood
from my teeth holding my tongue.

This is what I wanted to say:

Let me build you a house, a fortress.
I’ll tend to it. I’ll tend to you.

I’ll draw the bath, pull those heavy clothes
over your head. Show me the shape of you.
Lay your fears out to dry in the afternoon light.
I’ll fold them, soften them in the sun until
they fit like an old, faded t-shirt.

We can whisper beneath the covers,
trace the crest of our scars until
our fingertips can’t tell what’s mine
and what’s yours.

When it rains, we can put on that movie,
lie in the bed like angels in the snow.
I’ll show you that picture
(from right before the beginning).
Your pupils were blown and I could see
no end to us. Eternity stretching wide,
a front door swinging open.

Here’s the key. Welcome home.

Home Hangs on a Chain

Palestine hangs from his neck on a silver chain,
swinging, tethering, reminding him of that land
beyond the Dead Sea - a swim and an exile
away.

I want to take you there, someday.
He says it with indignant faith, a necessary
assurance that what is now leveled ground will rise
again into quiet towns, a lullaby lifting from the tongues
of neighbors in echoes of Here, come in, sit down.

To see the birthplace of his father, the roads he once wandered.
Descriptions glow with the delicacy of inherited memory,
immediately tainted by the resignation to knowing its contours
and its rivers indirectly, distantly.

As a child, he threw a stone from the shore,
hurled his grief into the sea - the lowest point on earth
supposedly.

Rachel Lovell was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where she works as a bookseller. Her poetry has previously been published in Literati Magazine. When not working or writing, Rachel spends her time reading, thrifting, or asking her mom how to cook basic meals.