garrett burrell

Rebuilding

We scrubbed the palace of its ghosts

not knowing Nineveh

bode beneath.    What slipped in

through shattered panes we can’t be sure:

it didn’t graze us.

There were nights when epochs buried

where the war still hadn’t reached

entered our rooms. Fairytale

mosaics glinted gold, they danced, whistled, boomed

over our cots. Desert plumed outside the gates and I know

sometimes we mistook the phantoms for our own.

In the rubble, hands and tongues

and the lifting of corners.

What we unearthed, we spread with mortar

and patrolled. Desperation and escape

appeared in the space between walls,

between sand and skin, ghost

and ghost, we picked up

one rock and another.

Nodo

That’s the end of a long braid swinging over jumpropes. The hand clutching. That’s nodo, a prayer before dinner. The part of a fire where flames graze the logs, a nodo… a nodo I saw once outside the bakery, two mouths coming together… In school I made a nodo with my hands when called on. I’ve heard of escape by nodo, but I don’t know this escape. It was white. But nodo isn’t white, it is brown, dark, avocado pit, twist of oak roots. We are born out of nodo, I’ve heard, torn from the throat of the earth.