Honeymoon

How to call these sheets a city, how to reach

out and touch. To say I’ll sing you a story

            to help you rest, to turn this background

            cacophony into lullaby; sung to sleep by manmade

sounds. How to plant our seeds in pavement

cracks, how to water the concrete. Here’s the thing

            we must understand—the sky doesn’t splinter

            like that, and neither will the ground. How all this thread

had to touch a hundred bodies before it touched ours. We know the time

this takes—sewing borders along the softest stretches of skin, singing

            softly though ceilings when they thought we couldn’t

            hear each other. They’ll realize these songs keep crawling up

our throats, becoming duet, humming so softly they can’t

hear. If they keep telling us how to split our bodies, to silence

            this harmony, we’ll be broken over our borders

            and at some point, they’ll have to realize we aren’t countries

apart, that sound is blooming into symphony

and this history is meant to be swallowed.

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Adam D. Weeks and Ellery Beck are both graduates of Salisbury University. They have collaborative poetry forthcoming in Sugar House Review. They are also two of the founding editors of Beaver Magazine.