Robert Okaji
Reticent as Ever, I Follow the Map
This old bed, knowing our secrets, our love
for the spiders of the world and their guilty
pleasures, wraps its history around us, says
“go easy, my friends,” and leaves us to our
research. I find the scar on your lower
back, that sacred heart of fusion,
trace the line on the map to the freckle
of grace and its inequities, then up to the left
ear, which requires attention. Speech
can only intrude upon my navigations,
yet I can’t refrain from murmuring the words
again, those never-tiring, never-depleting
syllables which always demand repetition,
wave after wave, an ocean of truth,
mingling and dispersing, accepting, giving,
swelling larger and more complex each day.
About the writer:
Robert Okaji lives in Texas. The author of five chapbooks, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vox Populi, North Dakota Quarterly, Gravel, Eclectica and elsewhere.
Image: You Don’t Need to Fix Me by Sara Burch. No medium specified. No size specified. By May 2019. By permission.
