THE DISTANCE IN A SÉANCE

                   by Nadim Choufi 

From the carpet each neck craned
to hold two heads, how often we get
the starting point of trees wrong.
We risk infinity between still stems.
This green almost becoming another blue.
Little inhales after the inhales settle
the nicotine in. Like light blindfolding me
with a recurrence under closed eyes.
Apertures that size their rescue & drown
the oars to call them, something, on their own.
The moments love is lover bypassing interrogation.
So much of anything is measured
with fingers by not looking at them.
I point to the ladder’s shine for the warm
carnage in your cheeks. This is how
it feels. Nails chewed down to a pulse
returning everything I enter.
A height furthered to eat with our hands
the same way our jaws leave them untouched.
Know that I keep you by happening to me.
Out on the balcony the sky fades
to the bodies it can’t carry & I try
to make sense of the gust
without spitting on my body.
Even you are here and when
what’s left of me sees more.




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Nadim Choufi is an Lebanese poet and his recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Versal, Sukoon, the Shade Journal, and elsewhere.