What do we do with what we lack? A cleft palate weakness, a harmony,
a sibling with whom to share ourselves. Quick and quarreling the rain
falls on memories no one is polishing. A few remain, hidden as if in
secrecy. New names ring over the graves, mute and soft like
moss-mouths.

My memory lines up the alphabet so that I can throw knives at it. Each
word carries an executioner’s hood pulled down over its past. My father
climbs up on rickety ladders and screws new light into fly-speckled
lamps. Always this care for the things. About the enlightened child.

To speak without friction about death, about the essence of a poem,
about the untruthful in this, by gestures’ created speech. Not to be able to
believe that you can control your life and let your hair fall everywhere. I
warm my hands on the cheek of the child glowing with sleep and carry
forth the words enveloped in mumblings’ quilt.

Who am I? Who are you? I lift my name up from the paper and blow on
it. With my hand I open the mountain you walked through.

Malena Mörling is the author of two books of poetry: Ocean Avenue and Astoria, and her third collection, Lumina Station, will be published in 2026 by Alice James Books. She has also published translations of work by Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer and together with Jonas Ellerström, a collection of the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems, the collection 1933 by Philip Levine into Swedish, and they have edited and translated the anthology, The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden published by Milkweed Editions. Mörling has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Dianna L. Bennett Fellowship from the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Photo Credit: Samuel J. Brady