harley tonelli / poem

CITRUS

When you held the crushed leaves of the lemon tree up to my nose, I thought about that late November in Italy, how miserable I had been, how I sprawled my disappearing body on the four poster bed looking out at the sea and convinced myself I would never again understand incandescence, the flutter of things. Sometimes you just have to look at bridges that look nothing like your bridges, overhear birds that sound nothing like the ones at home. Yellow-legged gulls circling above beached fishing boats. White porcelain dishes. You do not have to be happy, but you do have to retain some belief in the concept of lift. Singing persists. What I wanted to call the emptiness of my hands had always really been a window. The entire thing, just language, even though I pretended it wasn’t. Line break. A fragment. Punctuation all the way down.

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Harley Tonelli is a poet, musician, and lawyer from Seattle, Washington. Harley is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington Bothell in the Creative Writing and Poetics program, and has previously studied at the University of Washington School of Law and Berklee College of Music. Harley is passionate about birds, the ocean, and everybody getting free.