Are you afraid
someone else will see
the country
you tucked away
in your chest?
Or are you more afraid
that you perhaps
never left
at all?

How to Smuggle a Country through Customs, Naveed A Khan (from BY BODIES OF WATER)

memoryslandscape:

        So many things had I thought forgotten
      Return to my mind with stranger pain:
  —Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

Philip Larkin, from “Why Did I Dream of You Last Night,” Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

back to top