survival is at the end of most things

by Alina Kalontarov

The Big Bang is for the believers. 

I’ve swirled around in nothingness long enough

to know that change comes for you

in small, imperceptible increments.

Our hearts made a fragile clatter when they met,

like two sets of creped butterfly wings 

pinned against the wall, 

a willful abandon of flight.  

I used to study your hands 

and wonder on what mountain 

those rivered veins were forged,

into what ocean would they empty.

You used to watch my mouth when I spoke,

lips like feral peonies

curling in convulsions of poetry.

You didn’t know it then,

how stale the language gets

beneath the tongue. 

How even happiness can curdle

when left out too long.

We didn’t know that romance was

a coward’s enterprise,

that it takes nothing to blush a loin

into submission. 

All that, and along came a wind,

laughing at our convictions.

We set down all our minor risks

like discarded parables on a green street bench. 

It’s true. Even soft things can grow scales in the dark.

Even the past moves on without you. 

Even so, I wonder where you are. 

I’m still here, wintering in the violet sun,

returning my body to its sadness. 

Everything feels over,

and there’s so much living left to do.

Alina Kalontarov is a Humanities teacher in New York City. Poetry and photography have always been a way for her to rummage through the unspoken and unseen spaces in the world. Some of her work lives in Sky Island Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and in a forthcoming anthology, Words Apart: A Globe of Literature.