I. Remembering is often an act of violence. On whom I’m not sure: last night I cut my gaze on the splintered mirror of my memory, you inside it, slashed to slivers. In my mind you and I are forever by your bedroom window, fireworks raining down on our war zone city. Our world hopeless in past tense: corpses of buildings mourning themselves in green netting shrouds, tiny shoppers shuffling towards megasale hell. I your girl once, and you twice as pretty: my arms merely ribbons to wrap round your full hips, my lips like nails screeching against the music of your mouth — red and soft, ready to fill with blood. II. Watch how I break your body on the surface of this mirror. A mind can refract until you’re jagged as I am: lines cut through rigid skin, red smears over what was once clear, and your thousand-eye stare the cause for my bloodied hands, groping at the shards of everything we lost: this is how I keep the recollection safe. I keep it crooked enough to fit between cracks: I dance on a floor of splinters with my bare feet. III. There are nights when all the fissures meld back into place, when the shroud that covers the city falls away like rain. The pain is sharpest here, where you and I are still by your window, but the fireworks are blooming flowers among stars, and Ortigas is ours to wander within. Outside the neon-lit buildings shed their shrouds, soaring to forever: you and I are impossibly soft, and beauty is the easiest thing in the world.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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