Maiana Minahal | 2009 Poetry Finalist

Ordinary

Our honeyed tongues elude the rib of words

that could climb into open sky

or choke us like a pillar of salt.

We’ve approached flight before.

Found it too unguarded.

That gem whose absence hadn’t yet wounded

decades ago, when as a girl I hopscotched

under magnolia tree shade, next to the house on Samar Avenue –

and as a girl, oceans away, you might have pressed palms against a glass window,

perched in the back seat of a car crawling along the crumbling road to San Salvador.

I can almost picture you, years later, navigating the corridors of a strange university,

suddenly in the land of Clorox and strip malls.

In what cities since then, did we pack suitcases with filings of

grief, airplane across timezones between tropics and tundra?

When did we decide to shave down our wings?