I Know You Sleep In A Bomb Shelter

every night. Your curtain opaques the precious-
metal light that shrieks up the mountainside. In January,

your legs still twitch above the sheets. Do you get that dream anymore
of Jerusalem on fire? I can’t know now, a sea & ocean away: my winter flight

home was the lost mosquito of August: an unwanted
orchestra in my ear. Here, Mediterranean means solid valley arching

the earth’s meniscus: I sit my mug in the snow & pretend
condensation is my call back, particle-talk:

somehow it will wind itself
to you through endless white—my Alaska.

Remember when rainy season fell early—like the yahrtzeit candles
you bagged at the market without knowing their griefen purpose—

& made Fall all garlic, Jane Eyre, thunderheads: the sounds
we finally heard: how much the people were holding

their breaths until war broke, & they jerked
into the bends. Newspapers are a trigger

warning: the slanted word-paste, ink that won’t wash
from my fingertips: I need to start forgetting you.

The summer was figs. We can’t go back
now—the world cracked open with a touch.

Yael Massen is in her final semester of college at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her poetry has been published in SUNY Geneseo’s literary journals, MiNT Magazine, Opus, and Gandy Dancer. She will begin to pursue an MFA in Poetry this fall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.