some days I find myself lost
in the hot bright, wondering at the words.
Their long dusty roads, their arroz con leche,
their almost-home,
like mine, perhaps. I roll you around on my tongue:
indigo
indigo
in-di-go.
unbridled tastes wrong in our new-formed
mouths and yet we talk on, that light unseen
but not unremembered, how the tide breaks over
your hips your plum-ringed lips not like waves but like ceramics
crashing, crashing—
A sky so big it pushes down on my ribcage.
a love so big, maybe.
Do we play the fools now?
halfway into October and
afraid of our own skeletons.
there’s champagne dripping through
the attic floorboards of my heart. the vinyls
left spinning again, all the faucets running, for you,
for you,
you,
a soundtrack to the end of it all, all of you,
the end or maybe the middle but not the beginning,
not our beginning, definitely not:
some things
you can’t hide forever.
Margaret Schnabel is an Indiana-born musician, artist and writer. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review, Words Dance Magazine, and Alexandria Quarterly, among others. Besides poetry, she adores Indian food and everything art. She hangs out at starrymar.tumblr.com.
–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke