Skin

Your skin tastes like mumbling blue berries trapped inside sea shells, skies falling upon your collarbones
Did you really believe that the weight of this world could shatter you?
You carry butterflies inside your stomach
You love like tomorrow is but a fable
Tell me, do you not shudder when you think of the end?
Maybe heaven really is a beginning,
A strawberry stream flowing through the crevices of the wild forest that you are

Your skin tastes like a scream splattered across the wall
It’s red and soaked in wet sheets
There’s a sickness drowning you until you can’t breathe
Mother, I see how the heaven under your feet often makes the earth beneath it slip away
The clouds shake while God’s laughter echoes in your eyes
My first poem is your name, your name

Your skin tastes like an oration pleading for hope
A lullaby that sleeps over my chest
The winds carry my whispers and I feel your smile against my lips
My breath is a wild goose flapping its wings against a chest that has only known heaviness
How do you get used to feeling this light?

Your skin is my home, the window that is always open, the curtains that will never be drawn, the door that will never be locked and the poem that only begins

Your skin tastes like heaven falling in love with herself for the first time.

-Nameera.