xx So often with you I would stop my words and offer my hands: arms low, wide apart. I have nothing more to give, but, see, I have taken nothing. So we did not speak for a sunny year, and I gave my words freely, told by others how highly you prized them. Instead of shaking hands, I drew people into my arms, smiling, inevitably, at you across the room. So we do not speak at all. I lose my words in the mouth of another who remembers most days to return them. My hands are full of the sand of a new city, with burns from candles I no longer keep lit.
-Included in the Poetry Leaves installation, May 2017.
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