By Terra Brigando
And so, this is how I learn about myself – crying
in a bathroom stall at the Frankfurt train station in Germany.
My small breath hangs ghostlike in the air – it’s too cold
to breathe here, my body hurts from the mere exhaustion
of it, the trying to perform something so instinctual, yet
so hard.
And what do we learn of our bodies?
I can stay awake for 48 hours, even with the sour
taste of metal on my tongue, your blood
in my heart. I can miss you a thousand times over. The color
of the moon, even here, is yellow, a harvest moon,
so big and full in the clean-scoured Nordic sky.
And so I’m crying in Frankfurt, trying to pull
myself together amidst the unfamiliar snow, the ache
in my bones, the strangers’ faces
I almost recognize as my own, scared and unwilling.
Noon breaks its way through the cold and the ice,
and now I’m sitting on the train, my head heavy
and I’m thinking a thousand times over
of how we learn about ourselves: the instinctual part
and the almost incandescent line between
teeth and bone,
soul and heart.
*Author’s bio: Terra Brigando recently graduated from the University of Redlands with a B.A. in creative writing and had a poem published in the February issue of “decomP: a literary magazine.” She was the fiction editor of the university’s literary magazine, the “Redlands Review,” and has published various works in “Giraffe,” the university’s underground literary magazine.
