I scoop two pink palms like petals in the cups of my hands,

smell the delicate floral fragrance

of powder you just dusted on our seven pounds of flesh

after nine months of expectancy. You

frame my scruffy face etched with the load of machine guns and

tightly-wound vision of dying mates, on

a desert spell seven months stretched. It melts into shades of

longing until we’re fused in

a cowrie shell, and gurgle the night with doubts. At dawn we bead

hopes of a distant togetherness.

On a funereal day drenched with soundless lament of another adieu,

I see your hands having

agency as you knead the dough, the last before one more

surrender to our hyphenated lives. My fatigues

imagine your wait for fantasies to crowd around a simple

floor-length cotton dress.

***