“Hope, do you find strength?,” Shinji Moon

Hope, you are what my sister saw when she stood
looking across the mountainside of Sedona, Nevada.

When she came home she brought stories of 
medicine men and shamans and taking long walks
towards god, and we sat around the kitchen counter
counting red stones she took from the heart of a healing
land – an acorn stone, small animals of jade —
and a crushed up bottle with the palest of red sands inside.

Hope. When the medicine man asked her what she saw
looking at the silhouette of those white-peaked shifting plates,
she said your name, and he told her that what she saw in those mountains
were what decorated her own bones.

It is summer and the milk dew of our home keeps leaking into my lungs, 
into my skin, into my always autumn heart that keeps blushing
from red lips to orange leaves to yellow, yellow
the yellow of the sun across Picton waters, to the pale of
the veins of dried leaves, its heartbeat
its heartbeat
so much like
my own.

Hey Hope, do you hear me? 
I’ve been meaning to talk to you for days now
about something or another, about the way
my hands feel too small when I screw them on in the morning
as if I can’t hold anything in them
that doesn’t drain through the bottoms.

Hope, do you hear me?

I’ve been trying to call but the last few digits of your number
are smudged by my last boy’s rain, and I keep clinging
to a flat line that doesn’t exist 
but still I feel you pump my lungs
when I’m toppled over into myself with my knees rubbing
against my chest like I’m a cricket who lost its meter, and

Hope, I want you to know
that I believe in you like I believe in the soft heart
of my sister, who tumbled the glass of our childhood
with her palms so that I would never have to tread on anything
but a sea glass world, and

Hope, I want you to know
that I am here — thin wrists and gawky words
and screwed on limbs.

I am here. Listening. 
With every ounce of my fist sized heart.
I am here.

Hope, do you find strength? 
Do you know if its in season?

Because I’m trying to bake together a beautiful world
and the neighbors won’t lend
a cup or two to make this 
goddamn dough rise.

”

—	“Hope, do you find strength?,” Shinji Moon