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MAXIM’S I
from Issue 3 Fall 2021
by Akbota Saudabayeva
The room I am borne into is one of fairytales and frost-covered
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clouds, and the sky points to something that isn’t there.
Sleep arrives like a blindfold and salt.
The strange cymbals of sound and of hearts and diamonds;
the turbulence of all things unsaid, the seas unstill.
As they sing—
The hero slays the chimera. She splits the set of two, she swallows
the sword, and success, and success, and nothing. She stares towards the horizon,
blue and black and barely brown in rising, and swears she smells that same beast. The wind whistles past until everything is a river.
It rains here even on a cloudless day.
Let me start again—
I miss the thoughts that I don’t have. But winter shall run off
and good weather come again. Every day I sew more thread
onto the tapestry of our life. For me, red. For you, the color of Friday.
I want my love to stretch past the corner of your ear, where it can live
in your hair forever and ever until you wake to the smell of
my homecoming. A light flickers on and off. I follow you until my teeth find tail.
When you see me tonight, please know that I look away.
