I love my fingers; they are the only parts of my body that are genderless / I dream of myself hanging on the mast of a sailing vessel / this confirms my lost to the fire / The charcoal from the ruins soothes an upset stomach, but how do I swallow it? / If I shut my ears / it won’t mean the songs stopped playing / Here / what I cannot name / I call holy to avoid questioning / I remember days in my father’s library / half the books are without the covers / even though they were written in foreign languages / I knew they were written by dead people / when I think of an angel of death / I only see pictures of myself with bigger front teeth and auricles the shape of cones / The love for those parts of my body that are least sexualized are a form of worship / like Hurricanes / praised / because their destructions earn them names that help track our griefs / We are all named after the dead / or what lives but we may outlive / We sought holiness in the strangers we are yet to meet / even though everything holy has a cost / That’s how we lived until we cannot pay up the debt for all the fire we made up because we are hungry / and in those moments / we forget what memory it brings along / The fire that makes the sword cannot unmake its memory of the blood that wets its blade / Histories have been unfair to fire / we only hear of what it took from us / and not what it helps to birth / how it made us survive after we stopped mourning / I flirt with my grief and it birthed memories of eyes that lost the light in them to the stones in the water / We survived / because we know the fire is as guilty as the water / Its night somewhere in the west of this new country / a boy wriggles in his sleep / after saying prayers to a God that has my skin color.