Atlas & The Exact Weight of Calamity in Six Letters
Ariel Moniz
It’s reason that tells me
it could have been any name at all
but it wasn’t—
It was always yours.
It was always going to be yours.
It was always going to be your name at sunrise
echoing in the cavities created by our tangled sheets,
hushed, breathing fresh sun rays
like expensive perfume or a winter-smothered valley,
and it was always going to be your name
that was destined to undo me a dozen times
at half-past you breaking the horizon in two.
Your name in my flawed mouth
knotted in my discordant heartstrings
was never fit to be heard by anybody
but still I believe, more than I can carry—
it could have been more than this
walk off a desperate cliff, of this—
fragile thing—
this thing we call living
and you know it, you always have—
we were never meant for the Atlas-heavy silence
of what comes after the calamity that was us.
