POETRYRequiemTriin Paja
light dances like a dress inside the orchard ruins:
you say this was someone’s body
once. how we pray, like the woman
who walked in the city barefoot,
how we forget her face but not her holy feet—
nothing survives the ordeal of language
but like the moon these moments
need a place. I cannot explain how your skin
becomes the laundry-water left blue
by the tint of your cornflower dress. how
your voice becomes bread but I do not become
voracious. your pulse that creaks
like a church gate. your heart, a ruined piano.
when we make love we become a song
haunted by its own sound (we cannot
live without forgiveness). how we pray.
like a gardener who abandons his orchard,
how we pray beneath his maples growing
in a memory, our hands gloved in light. how.
Triin Paja is an Estonian living in a small village in rural Estonia. She writes in various cities, countries, forests, fields, riverbeds. She's interested in silence, plants, moths, and travelling.
spider up her thigh in the dimly lit room
held down, stared down
embers of the abyss snap around her
My father sexually abused me.
When I got married,
I hyphenated my name.
No one questioned it at the time.
But in the middle of my parents’ late divorce,
everyone wants to know about names.
Nietzsche warned us not to look
long into the abyss, or it will look long
into us.
It was finally
his home until
abruptly
his mind flashed
all the times he had entered a
boy
i was depressed,
and i wanted
to take a
walk;
you said you'd join me—
didn't mean i wanted
netflix and chill,
it happened before words came
to tell me how to feel about it
newly connected neurons torn apart
or perverted—
forever firing blanks into the microbiological air
As a child
The lessons taught
Can bring a pain never thought.
The lessons on trust
And heartache
Sear the soul.