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The Milky Way Escapes My Mouth

from Words Like Love (audio book) by Tanaya Winder

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lyrics

whenever two lips begin to form your name
I cough stars lodged deep within my lungs. They rush
from tongue weighted in dust, words
I didn’t ask

where are you going? or notice the blank spaces
in your breathing as you slept. They say
the more massive the star, the shorter
the lifespan.

They have greater pressure on their cores. Yours burned
so brightly I should have known you’d collapse, disappear
into image, a black hole dissolving
trace amounts.

I am left stargazing five times a day for years. Catalogue
phrases. Chart each word. Label every facial expression.
Telescope until eyes bleed constellations
even then

I can’t navigate my way into understanding light years –
how we let darkness slip in. Is it madness to wonder
if it ever really happened? You, a shadow never leaving until I

inserted continents between us. I lost you in the crevice
between night and day. You died while I was sleeping
dreaming of a galaxy far far away where
love eclipses.

A rising tide of longing fills my body, bones, the ribs
sheltering the cave within me echoing. Each night,
I open mouth sky-wide to swallow stars
and sing

to the moon a story about the light of two people
who continue to cross and uncross in their falling
no matter how unstable
in orbit.

credits

from Words Like Love (audio book), released December 17, 2015

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about

Tanaya Winder Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tanaya Winder is a writer, educator, motivational speaker, and spoken word poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a BA in English. She has a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. You can follow her on Twitter at @tanayawinder ... more

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