is always the heart of the question, isn’t it?
One that’s difficult to answer except perhaps
in the form of another question: that is, we feel it
there, lodged in the space close to the gut,
which is just fingers away from the heart,
and so really they might as well be the same
barometer of feeling or non-feeling,
there being no easy half measures,
no in-betweens— Either you eat the fruit
or you leave it in the tree, either you leave
the slug on the leaf or reach for the sear
of salt, either you leave the bullet shell
lodged long near the spine, or risk forced
entry— there being no real argument that doesn’t
engage that space in the center of us all, that space
where a seed might grow into thought, into song,
into a child, into speech, into a reckoning.
In response to Via Negativa: Writer of Color.
Just lovely. Thank you for writing this. Emotively captures so many things for me. Salamat po, again.