Oasis

By Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman
So much like rain, the trail of stitches
in slow descent, recalling the gravity
of her shoulder far above. She wears
the cotton’s soul like effulgence,
carries something old, blazing. What is
beautiful
cannot be handed over. A man asks
what she would do with an ocean
of silver. She says she wears gold
and means
everything you know in this world can
be taken. She goes to the market
and the market blows apart. Like how the
wind
can carry only cloth, her memory is a
cornucopia of atoms, the smell of clay
in smoke. There the penumbra of her
answer: O everything but what you gave
away.