Photo by Carlos Bryan on Unsplash

there is no word for sorry in our language

I could not find butterflies
in that overgrown lawn of yours So, I turned to
swallowing doves instead because I want to understand.
A scream is trapped under my third rib where they perch on
like a perilous branch. I daydream of
            You: hands on my throat
            me: telling you I love you
And then it is only confession. like gasping, like rain water.
Like lightning without thunder.
I recourse– sutured my mouth.
I leave my bruised tongue on your doorstep.
Now longing only to know what my teeth used to feel like.
I seek it back again in the attic, on the neck of a lover
sometimes in a jaw full of tremors.
But this poem is of callousness, A necrosis. There is no doorstep,
there is no lover, dead doves fester in me, There is a word for sorry in our language,
            there is no word for forgiveness.

Amy Lafrankie is a young Filipino-American poet living in the Philippines. Her work has previously appeared in TrackFour Journal, Murmur Journal, Synaesthesia Magazine and elsewhere. She tweets @geminiyear.