Somewhere in the back left pocket of my childhood it is still raining.
The poplars bend under drop after drop, heavy as my mother’s
swollen stomach as she stands against the stove,
staring through a twilit window at a world into which I am not yet born.
In the front right pocket, my father peels mangoes
with hands as gnarled as tumbleweeds, mouth full of sweetness.
His spine curves under the weight of my impending existence,
unaware of the strain my life will place on all of us,
the night turning inside out again and again like a compass needle
trying to find its way to true north.
In the zipper of my childhood my mother and father met,
fork in the middle of the road, joining of hands,
that endless rain pouring between their cupped palms.
Somewhere in that zipper my mother and father made me,
and somewhere halfway up the front leg
they split up and left one another.
In the back left pocket of my childhood, it is always raining.
It never stops.