Postcard of Avenida Jardines del Duque That night the gecko became a half-moon scar asleep against the white ceiling. The balcony door was open even though the rain tapered from the sky, the thick green leaves suddenly the skin of drums, heavy with rhythm. The air lifted the fly-netting from my back as I dreamt of dissolving into this earth, my hair transformed into curling trellises that flower into brilliant panicles of bloom. I placed my mouth against the interior skin of forearm and could still taste the ocean, the same ocean I fought all summer who, like a deranged lover, had washed me up against the volcanic cliffs until my legs were etched with wounds, permanent petroglyphs of this journey. I finally gave up trying to write descriptions in letters, instead allowed lizards to crawl across the paper, transcribe the script onto their pale bellies and carry it into the shade of the orange flame vine beneath the Chinese cracker flower. Words became impotent in the heat and I grew to understand the cool understated prose of silence. That last night each moment was an opening of pores, of tiny doorways; a sensuous translation into a language in which I would never truly be fluent. The Keening of Icebergs Geophysicists say it’s like something from a horror film — each iceberg weeps its own lament when crevasses inside flow with water and set its walls vibrating. But what is meant by these keenings? This is the sound of ice sundered — like oak bending to break, like the tones of an abject viola found in the calloused fingers that pluck a string ready to snap, like a voice reduced to rasp when words like love or tomorrow scrape the throat, corrugate the tongue. To ask what is meant is to wonder about the shape of an hour, how to fit the body to its frame, how a husk of prayer can encase a name. Awaited Reply After a letter from Katia Grubisic A decade later, as a woman, I stood on Langestraße and tipped back my umbrella to reassure myself of the truth of rain on my eyelids. I wrapped the sensation around myself as one would a coat that bears the cologne of someone passed. I sheltered under the canopy of a street vendor, chose a pomegranate and held it to my lips, inhaled, vermilion staining my tongue. Words saccharine, gritty, clotted my mouth and left me unable to explain to the man arranging pears “I want this one” or “I wish the rain would end.” This city is not my home but my mother’s. It bears down with brick and traffic, and it contains half my language halb meiner Sprache, halb meiner Stimme. The other half arrives in creased envelopes with your handwriting that stretches a thousand miles of distance taut, your words explaining how, at the All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Buffet, you wrote me this letter on the back of a placemat , its left corner greased from stray scrambled egg, a stain I can’t help touch as I read the line: I saw wild horses and thought of you.