Latvian Feature more poetry

Margita Gailitis There Was No Weather There was no weather, as I remember when we first met. We didn’t discuss how hot how cold how depressing how shall we prolong    evade    the rain You’d enter rooms raw waiting for my skin to run to you wrap as cellophane does, excluding nerve ends tied mind ribboned, but that was before                       we started speaking lost our thees and thous, assumed albino identities, shielded our fragilities our language without diminutives                       a language that does not distinguish us from crowds dodging pain. Into Concealment The woman no longer sits at her window, burns her welcoming eyes. The man who last came for oblivion to her body paid in sorrow, pulled her blinds. She paints her mouth into red-triangled silence, into concealment, concubine, where she braids the disordered fringe of her senses, a lacquered coil she pins to the questions in her mind. She draws her hands back into self-embrace, hidden in the sling of a kimono sleeve, her fingers press to her pulse that murmurs, over and over, her name.