steep / and it is home | poetry by Giovanna Lomanto

steep

rustle and a creak hardly
anything sounds like birdsong
anymore. the artifacts

are six feet over-the-
moon kind of fork gets 
lost in the utensil drawer.
when you finally find a

knife (and what's even the
point anymore) you say with
a heavy heaving

sigh and yes, we make break-

fast on the long dining room
table. when you are
explicit, i am complicit. bachata 
is funny now that you insist
that we are dance

partners after november
and—dammit, the
avocado i picked is underripe 
for the fourth time this

week. someone stop me from
tripping on the ground beneath
oil slicks, and maybe we can find
an under-the-sun spoon on
new year's day.

and it is home

enjambment derives from the french word to stride
over, sings of anything that questions the fabric's
hem. i want to sew seams and patches and embroider
flowers into empty pockets on mornings where the
hackney meets the grassy underfoot of relief. by
which i mean i want to hold myself as a person whose
home is breaths of liminality, enjambed between city
streets and striding over the borders of the pacific. i
always lose my way. maps are helpful, but i remember
the left bank and the way i just kept turning and hoping
i'd end up on a familiar street, and i wanted to stop
and talk to the seamstress that one afternoon on the
seine. ask her about how to sew seams. patchwork.
i've always been little grafted bits of people i've loved,
and when people say that falling in love is a rarity, i
laugh and think of the man who stopped me on the
street and yelled "SHOE GAME!" to anyone who would
listen. shovel and dirt, i dug myself into the sidewalk
and wanted to tell him that i'd had these shoes for years,
that i shine them myself, that the lining is holding
strong. things have a togetherness. and maybe that's what
the enjambment of nail polish-stained jeans really refers
to—the migratory monarchs passing through, all orange
and fluttering. i move with the same wingbeat. seasonally,
i run to the edge and find new people to love so ardently
that my head aches in vibrato and my heart sings in a
staccato so pointed that, no joke, my resting heart rate is
120 beats per minute. and get this, it's always like that, it's
always like that, it's always like that night when i stood
under that streetlight off bilby road and felt my chin tilt
skyward. i kissed the dusk that day, and it tastes of nutmeg.
walk over, stride over, enjamb the evening sky. it feels
like patchwork.