Dear bullet,

I am going to live inside of this poem
and never get out.
Here, my love still touches me. Here, there is still his life.
And he smells like a new shower.
And formaldehyde. And snow,
if snow had a smell.

Reminiscing about him does something to my mind.
I forget things, my own name, my heart’s compass
and perhaps I fear the permanence of borderless loves
and disappear that version of myself, like snow upon a fence.
And isn’t there a constellation named for that? And isn’t it visible
from his motherland?
*
Protest guide me like the North Star
Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry/our fight for you will never die.
chants lure my thoughts into further wonder.
Our lips. Our voices. Our breaths.
No bombs. No bullets. And the moon,

henceforth, I am a poet again.
In a long tradition of lonesome poets,

who toss their poems up to a moon
and pray that uncertain loves only pretend
to unravel a heart’s gauze.
*
Heart so shattered
got nothing else to do but love. Dear Gaza,
for precisely this reason, I am outside and this
winter’s moon is a welcomed distraction—an old friend
plucking us up from the ground. Undoing
the catastrophe.

Welcome,
old friend, old friend,
welcome.