Span wide, an expanse Poem by Lies Van Gasse

Span wide, an expanse
that hangs for seconds above sky level
until a rippling, a whooshing
shatters the dome, suddenly:

flecks of light become façades,
lines become windows, streets,
shadows drag us like mobs
along winding ways.

The road is rolled up and rolled out
and, meanwhile, voices tremble, clouds daze.

Between our words
we have stashed a rifle.

Behind our teeth
is a thread that binds two minds,

but this is unexpected (our lives
cross namelessly in this yellow vehicle
and when we lose eye contact, then you dissolve)

, someone has cut something off:
a road with a pothole,
hundreds of lives with a shot
a day with the night

that rolls me out, drunken, over the cobbles of Taksìm,
like shards of glasswork between bloodstains.

I miss your boy's skin
on which, dancing, I set the strangest signs.
I read it, but my tongue, unskilled
fails to taste the letters.

I miss your boy's skin
that now, later, rubs roughly up against me.
Disdainfully, your voice jars my elbow,
I cannot lay you between my palms.

I miss your eyes,
which, days later, still sparkle hesitantly
in the video images of a raid,
an article on the attack,
on this white, luminescent sheet.

I miss your boy's skin,
poached from your translucent, white bones.
It was hanging to dry on the windowsill,
but my head didn't fold.

Ultimately, it's getting to be just like here.
Here, things are ending up just as ultimately intended:

an area of eroded brick,
burning cement, a sandstorm,
rusty steel rods, a hand -

We lick up the rubble, green-eyed and foul
and move our street map up a few villages.
It's warm, we set our hair straight above the steppe
and build a new city.