i’ve never gotten used to the gritty cries of my mother’s radio.
shoves dissolve into pushes—calculated movements—silence breaks & with 

each split second, she becomes a familiar channel, switching,
in between short breaths of relief and another feeling, one

i never seem to dissect,
i never seem to release from the many cadavers
i carry,  unnamed. 

i catch a whiff of another color on her skin, a shade
different from the almost coffee-like one she carries

& for a moment, weightless isn’t what her eyes hold.
i’m thrown into an abyss, with walls that scream nothing but silence. 

i dive but those echoes become chains & this vessel,
far from being a wrecking ball. 

hit pause,   rewind.   perhaps
nostalgia can be a balm for these burns. 

my head hits the past, windows become a door, it’s morning
& the sun doesn’t knock before replacing the color of these walls. 

this time, i remember the cocktail of a cuckoo’s chirps
& a familiar song on her radio, the honey, the power it balanced. 

blue replaces the taste of blood my lips carry—sweet—
heavy enough to morph this tongue into a scale. 

i forgot to ask, can her song on this radio try to fill a void without turning into one itself? 

how long will my mother shed these colors,
how long till her teabag oozes its last juice? 

i’m trying to be a locked box, to hold these silent noises in, 
to stop this calm ocean from running a race of chaos. 

i can’t stop thinking about those eyes, i can’t,
what do you do when your body hums the blade’s song? 

do you let each pore on your skin sing back & struggle to find
a key, wondering what miracle lives in the depths of harmony? 

or do you bring its tip to teach you the art of spilling? of melting
all that’s left in this vessel of blood and bones, of tears and fears, of

everything you see in your mother eyes, into dust
& watch yourself be a songbird, in the skies of oblivion. 

perhaps one day, you would journey into those eyes
again and arrive as a testament to hope, to healing.