Some say there are days which will stick in our memory
like how to a strip of brown paper a fly might become glued;
In a child’s first words, on one’s gold-gilded birthday,
or when another first tells them, “I do”:
But as I am too young for that,
I know My day comes on April 14th.
It’s a day which creeps up on me, then it carries me over,
burrowing down like thick weeds in a garden of glass—
with fetid roots of fine sand, scratching deep through the surface,
it releases prickled pinpoints of poisonous gas:
Though the air burns like an Ifrit,
I breathe deeply on April 14th.
Its vines lengthen and grow, bearing rotted fruits which ripen
on tearful showers meant only to feed flowers in May!
“May I pluck them?” he had ask Me once where, curled like cats
on creaking boards of a kitchen, together we’d lay:
My vase lies empty in its plinth by the door
yet my heart finds the floor on April 14th.
As its bottom bakes bone-dry, I fail and try
to capture the fly with the paper I violently tear—
I see no nettles there, nor the fruit they bear,
as my retinas crack like ice in a dead-desert eye:
Once they were faucets which ran everyday for it,
but now they just leak a bit
and, at last, only ever
on April 14th.
Menkiss Monthly 