After the Sandstorm and Other Poems

By Danae Younge

After a Sandstorm

Your peck extracts remaining
wind from a cooled forehead.  

The ruins pile up before us,
meld like a glaring flame pinched
on the horizontal landscape,
a solute to the wallpaper.

Yet the overlapping eye of
our circular universes
squints further
with mine as I look at you,
as we trek side by side
through the dunes.

Creeping

At first, scarce speckles.


One to the scalp.


Four days.


Another like dewdrops
Caught in the morning’s lashed fringe


Two days.


The vein on my left wrist cries
A soft tear, single bead of ruby
Drips a shiver like arachnid legs

Before the right joins in

And droplet pools meld
Into a gloss sheet.

And my psychiatrist says
I might want to consider
Wellbutrin instead.

A night, then

Cumulonimbus clouds whirl
               Ruthlessly into my present
And I plead like a stray. Soaked hair and blue dress skin-stuck
Like a bodysuit of plastic wrap, Girl steeping in a cobalt moon-tide.
What an awful way to die Over, and over again- Suffocation,resurrection,repeat.

Evening’s Vulnerability

The night is prettiest when it’s naked.
When the sky drops down its yellow robe, 
exposing its bare back, 
and sunlit creases fold and drape like silk. 
Earth’s crevices whisper seductively 
as we sit, bodies touching, on his rooftop.
His hand lays shyly on the zipper of my dress 
and our worn shoes tap together 
in a rhythm-less honesty.
It is just us. 
The neighborhood streets are vacant. 
 
We’d watched as each article 
was stripped from the frame.
The process was slow and wanting. 
The people were the first to leave,
then their echoing shadow sounds, 
which stole away with pieces of our attention 
in the moments leading up to sunset. 
His parents took off to the beach 
and children came inside for supper 
then snuggled up in pocket homes - 
kept safe for now, pulled out tomorrow. 
Let them eat and sleep in silence.
Night is prettiest when it’s naked. 
 
Our own meal was the next to go:
Devoured spoonfuls revealing little patches 
of our lilac plates one by one
like skin exposed by fingered buttons of a cardigan, 
so that we were turned full and round 
and the grumbling of stomachs 
was left on the kitchen floor. 
 
Our anxieties were the last. 
The pressing feeling of necessity, 
urgent responsibility pushing in on a twisted chest,
he unclasped and let it fall away from evening. 
 
We are freeform now, 
and a tight exterior of worry has been shed. 
The air and our limbs are softened to jelly 
awkwardly, our bodies seem to stutter, 
stumble over peacefulness as we sit.
 
Watching our world undress - 
still clothed while the night lays down 
like a muse for a painting -
we bask in the simplistic scene. 
Soon, we will go inside. 
The night is prettiest when it’s naked. 
And so, I think, are we.