Read a letter without opening it. Finally
swam in evening. Between
the lines. Mostly my fingers touch

that place. Box up everything once,
and again. This silence makes you write
everything twice. What happened
to the clock inside the station? Missing

a hand. Start taking the stairs. Still
waiting. Is your night a spiral yet?
Listen to music. Assign a color to each

note. Lack has a color, too. My stay
here, for you, I guess. Try to find the city
you miss. But I’ve been all over. Under

the biggest clock. Move on. No matter
the time. Where did I put it? Stop
mentioning fractures. Do you feel
like…Feel something. Climb the stairs.

That mute space between us. What
to name it? Learn a new language.
Words that run away from their houses. 

__

I spent an entire night tearing apart old emails and rearranging words. The result was an attempt to translate what hadn’t been said. Kapka Kassabova’s words from her book Geography for the Lost were stuck in my head—that to “live inside two different languages...means being constantly on the move, skipping over invisible borders of identity and meaning.” I imagined the skipping as a climbing of a spiral staircase—a correspondence with stairs.