Hi, I'm Jeni.

Mesquite Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Park

Sunlight fractures
across a half-remembered terrace,
where marigolds bloom—

tender, unrelenting,

across the spaces watered with longing.

In the silence,
a teacup chimes.
A breath caught mid-laughter

meets the sigh of a door,

too gentle to be known

as goodbye. 

Sometimes, the wind remembers
the footsteps on mosaic tile.
It moves through the veranda
where Ama once stood,

her eyes hollow—

answering to something

I was never born to witness.

We exist in these liminal spaces:

in airports, where my father sobs,

in my loving memory,

in moments where silence is sung as sacred—
where I sit, in my innocence,
watching planes vanish into the valley.

It is carnal,

how I learned to archive love

in syllables and artifacts—

as if they aren't bound

by the very laws of impermanence.

These are the deserts:
not barren,
but brimming with images 

of selves, estranged against a fading past.

There is no language

For how time threaded her absence through my body—
I hold onto the myth
that our memory was not fiction.

That she existed.

That she exists, still.

I see her in dreams
Where she is still young—

still waiting.

And I—

suspended in light of morning,

stand by the doorway,
recalling her golden laughter,

knowing,
I will return a thousand more times
for a glimpse of those eyes

I once mistook
for god.