I am alone, I am not alone. I am water flowing, going, another, another father, another fire, flood, place, tribe. Tribe I remember. I remember your held name, strong, sweet, your forgotten name. I remember name, your woven existence, your fiery, unfamiliar name. I remember your nomad face, your glittering eyes, your carpenter hands. I remember and forget.
[All things turn to fire and flood and you are nomad and I am water and we are alone and not alone.]
Chant, chant your unfamiliar name. Pull vowels forgotten from your stomach. I come from that same dark place. I come from the river stitched by four sisters (or were there five?), broken by soil and sod, sand and red, red brick of dirt under your hardened fingernails. Time’s cellar, a skinless pendulum shortening and lengthening our powwow, our obsession. Your cold river sheets gritty with sand.
I blame that wildfire making hitchhikers out of us, pitching our tents not in romantic, djembed Bedouin ways but in the carving rock of desert slicing into your shoulders, your ribs, your abdomen, into my unfamiliar sister breasts, sandwiched and catalogued between sandy rivered sheets where only the kitchen table survives fire and flood.