Jordan A. Leturgez

Every other city we go becomes a small religion --
a cathedral built from our suitcases, ticket stubs,
and the way you cup your hands around a steaming cup
like it might confess the route it took to find you.

In Marseille the sea taught us how to argue softly,
blue and salt between our teeth; in the next place
we learned to speak in corners, in leftover bread,
the quiet grammar of two people trying not to leave traces.

Every other city we go keeps a piece of your jacket,
laces knotted into memory, a receipt folded like a prayer.
One city glows with neon and stolen kisses at three a.m.;
the next is a photograph of a bench where we apologized
for the weather and for everything else we could not change.

There are cities where we sleep like travelers in borrowed names,
where strangers offer directions and we are grateful for the past.
There are cities where the lamps throw our shadows long and hopeful,
where we map each other on the backs of postcards and hotel keys.

Every other city we go is a ledger of small miracles:
the street musician who taught us a chorus, the bakery that kept our secret,
the taxi driver who listened and refused to fix our problems.
Between them, in the odd ones, the silence gathers meaning,
a quiet room where we relearn how to be two without decaying.

By the time we learn the language of stoplights and rain,
the orbit of our feet has become a constellation.
We carry cities like coins--some bright, some worn flat--
and when we press them to our palms at night they still hum,
like a promise we are not sure we ever made but keep anyway.

Every other city we go is not a loss but a ledger of living:
an atlas of small departures and the tender ways we return.
When the plane lifts its hands and the skyline thumbnails away,
I count the spaces between us and know: we are always building home
out of the few things we keep--each other, and the names we refuse to forget.

We stoke them like small rebellions -- palms cupped
around sparrows of ember, feeding breath until
the hush refuses to stay. Night bends closer,
curious as a cat, and the first sparks remember
their names: longing, ruin, tenderness.

They do not burn politely. They roar
through the corridors of ordinary days,
igniting the curtains of routine, leaving
maps of light on the floorboards. We walk them
like pilgrims, barefoot on coals that glow
with old maps of what we swore we'd become.

Sometimes the blaze scours us clean -- a bright
surgery that leaves scent of cedar and salt.
Sometimes it devours the furniture of habit,
leaving only ash and a single, stubborn ember
that glows like a promise we forgot to keep.

Love is not a candle: it is a wildfire that learns
to read our faces, to chase the syllables of our laughter,
to tender the bones that feared to be touched.
It feeds on the moon's reflection in your coffee,
on the silence after a storm. It is both anthem and warning.

So we hold each other like flint and tinder,
knowing that to strike is to change forever:
to walk out incandescent, to walk home rebuilt,
to carry, beneath our ribs, a geography of light --
hearts on fire, not to consume us, but to show us what will still burn.

Midnight breathes like a softened bell --
a hush of smoke and hopeful glass raised to the sky.
We fold the year into the palm of memory,
watching old mistakes turn to ash that glows
a little warmer than we expected.

Streetlight confetti, socks of laughter,
someone's tired song made bright by strangers' voices.
We count backwards and then forward, a small miracle:
seconds unhooked from regret,
seconds rewired to possibility.

There are pockets of grief we tuck beneath our coats,
buttons sewn over cracks -- not to hide but to keep warm.
Resolutions arrive as quiet visitors,
bearing simple gifts: a promise to be kinder,
a vow to listen to the soft things first.

A child unfurls the future like a paper boat,
and in the steam of hot coffee, futures steam too --
some will sing, some will stumble, some will arrive
with maps of scars that read like constellations.
New cheer is not the absence of pain;
it is the courage to light a match anyway.

So we step across midnight's thin line,
carrying last year's lessons like careful luggage,
and release what refuses to bend.
The sky fills with tiny suns of laughter,
and for a brief, shaking moment we believe
in beginnings as if they were prayers answered.

Hold this cheer like an ember in your palm:
tend it with truth, feed it with small acts.
By morning, the city will be ordinary again,
but something in us will remain brightened --
a single room lit from within,
ready to meet the quieter miracles of the year.

There is a drum in the chest -- not asking permission,
only keeping time with the slow tilt of the world.
Morning folds itself into the palms of your hands,
coffee cooling like a promise you almost kept;
the city exhales, a map of small fires and small mercies,
and somewhere a child learns the fierce geometry of falling.

The river does not consult the stones before it passes,
it remembers every grief and every name
and carries both like pebbles in bright mouths.
Light finds cracks in the ordinary and pours through,
insistent as forgiveness, as stubborn as a lighthouse
that has no business still calling ships home.

Love is kinetic -- a language of repeated gestures,
notes returned in the margin of a day. Loss is kinetic too:
it arranges itself into the furniture and the silence,
sits in your chair as if it had always lived there,
learns the cadence of your hands at the sink,
keeps visiting at the hour you thought was private.

It never stops: the turning of seasons, the folding of maps
we thought we'd read through. It never stops:
the naming of things, the singeing of hope and the rescue,
the ringing of keys, the making of beds, the letting go,
the beginning and the small remaking after ruin.
We are paper boats on a rain that insists on rising.

Sometimes it is tenderness that will not pause,
a stranger's umbrella given without explanation;
sometimes it is the ache that rehearses itself at night,
a slow metronome beneath the ribs. Both keep time,
both insist on being lived through. We are not finished
with what we are learning to be -- not yet, not ever.

Stand, if you can, with your palms open to the noise:
the endless work of love, the stubborn chorus of sorrow,
the quiet repairs, the sudden laugh that undoes you.
There is a pulse in everything that breathes and breaks,
and even in breaking, something decides to continue.
Listen: it never stops -- and for now, that is a way to live.

Every dog has its day,
a small sun rising where the pavement cracks--
a gnawed slipper baptized in morning light,
a tail that learns to count the world.
Some days are thunder: sprinting down alleys,
nose like a compass to the vanished scent of dinner,
others are hush, a bed warmed by remembered hands.

There is the streetwise king with dust for a crown,
who finds a spilled sandwich and is royal for an hour.
There is the champion in the backyard--leaps like a yes,
eyes bright with the grammar of fetch,
who comes back every time with the whole day's praise caught in his mouth.

There is the old dog whose joints keep ledger,
who remembers every door that ever opened,
who dreams of running and wakes to the ache like a bell.
When the child drops a slice of toast, his tail--slow as forgiveness--answers.

There is the small one under the shelter light,
nose pressed to a cool, hopeful window,
who waits through seasons of goodbyes until a hand arrives,
and the world tilts, a plain made new as a bowl of water on a hot day.
For some, the day is loud with applause; for others, it is a single soft hand.

Every dog has its day,
not always the headline, but a holy quiet: a lap, a leash, a laugh,
the warmth of one familiar voice reciting the same silly name.
Sometimes it's a road that ends in a porch where the moon lays its silver paw.
Sometimes it's the simple miracle of being seen.

So let mornings be patient and let sunsets keep their secrets.
Listen for paws like small metronomes on the floor--count them.
Because when that day comes, it will be a bright thing:
brief, ordinary, fierce as joy, and it will make everything else forgiveable.