This is a rundown building across a mall with cheap stores and an empty parking lot. I can hear my neighbours. I can hear the walls: a bit of sand, or water, or a mouse, trickling down. In the apartment next door, a woman prays. She sounds close, we sit next to each other, there’s only a thin screen between us. She improvises and repeats her calls , we put ourselves in your hands, oh God, Alleluia, yes Lord, Thank You Jesus. Her voice trembles, and I imagine a pair of stretched hands pleading for a child, or a father, shaking with worry. We share a February Monday framed in dead sidewalks and the ink skeletons of a couple of trees. In this building we can hear each other, but all our voices traveled a long way. I close my eyes and think of the garden outside my mom’s house, in Mexico, visited some mornings by a family of horses: a stallion, a mare, a skinny loaf, honey-collored, moving without hurry in their own tenderness. I don’t believe in Jesus, or God, but I say out loud along with my neighbour, Thank You.

in quiet winter

the cut branch blossoms

as tangerine