Re: Julia Naman
What was this hand, sitting so resolutely in yours,
before either of us? Was it someone else’s?
Was this wine once Hitler’s spit, my baby a fork?
Instead of starting marks and finish lines, births and deaths,
we must operate like the moon: in cycles. Soon these hands—
so reclined, so assured in their existence—will be earth again,
the earth will be trees, the trees will be paper on which anyone
can write anything. Who knows the things we will say then.
But if I should choose the next time around, and you are
still here, you have not already become a doorknob,
or a bicycle wheel, then I would choose to be the fur
on the inside of your jacket, the drapes you close at night.
Perhaps I’ve been these things before. Maybe, as we talk
about Doklam and Bhutan and Other Places we think
we haven’t seen, these molecules of ours have their lips
pressed tight to hold back laughter, eagerly waiting until
we fall asleep for a chance to swap old stories.
Julia Naman is a California-based writer and musician. After graduating from Pepperdine University in 2018 with a creative writing degree, Julia received a Fulbright Scholarship to West Bengal, India, where she spent the past year teaching English. She now works as a performing/recording artist and freelance writer, recently receiving Honorable Mention in the Saturday Evening Post's 2019 Great American Fiction Contest for a short story. Julia is a Tumbleweed at Shakespeare & Co in Paris.