Odyssey – Anuel Rodriguez
I remember days that felt edgeless
and nights that left slipknots inside my skin.
I spent years trying to cross the same pale ocean with a lit candle.
I feel displaced, searching for a body to build a shelter for my ghosts,
searching for a lighthouse that has been blurred out of reality.
Sometimes you tiptoe through my dreams
and leave pieces of yourself for me to find like graying amber.
I would study your features for years like they were frescoes and write poems by the blemished light of your fire.
I’ve become an abstraction of flesh— a shipwreck of nerves.
One day I’ll cross that pale ocean, or sink into time like a flame without a home.
Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry has appeared in Glass: Poets Resist and The Road Not Taken.