So Together, So Soon
In this era of our apart,
I have learned how to live alone.
Breakfast with a single piece of toast, without
the small red promises
that only survive on the widths of our lips.
On the phone, I speak
in the language of tomorrow,
where meaning is made
from imagined mountains, hypothetical dogs
we would walk around forest and peak.
There is not enough vodka
to grab life from the vanquished backs
of old anguishes, not properly drank.
I experience my skin as a terrible ache,
an always pain, under my ribcage
where your armprint fades, remembered.
When we confess, we already know.
Water must lie flat on its stomach.
Exclusively, our conversation sways
into love and the expanses
of our most enormous cathedral.
And yet, when you tell me
of your dreams, even your dreams
punish me with possibilities.
About the Author: Brian Chander Wiora is an Indian-American poet from Dallas, Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Literary Review, The McNeese Review, The Florida Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and other places. He graduated with an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in 2020, where he received the Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship.
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Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Burned Redwood” (2020)
As It Ought To Be 