Kazim Ali

July

We lay down in the graveyard, hinged there.

 

 

 

Emerald moss growing thickly in the chiseled letters.

 

 

 

You’re explaining how trees actually breathe.

 

 

 

Green in the names and trees went up to join gray in the sky.

 

 

 

Then the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me.

 

 


July appears in The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005).