My name is Podrig Otuma, and when I was growing up, most of the poems that I learned in school were rhyming poems.

And rhyming is one of those things that comes in and out of fashion in contemporary poetry.

Different places will favour it, or other places will say that, you know, rhyming is a thing of the past.

Lots of the old English language and other language poems rhymed too.

But in other languages, old poems didn't rhyme in what we might think of as a perfect rhyme,

but they might have used very, very mathematical measurements of syllable count or alliteration or assonance as well.

And of course, then, lots of poems use internal rhyme.

And all of those techniques, all of those metricalities, whether rhyme or alliteration or assonance or syllable count,

all of them bring us back to the primary music of all of our lives,

which is the heartbeat.

Coming out of the shower by Armand Avudian. Coming out of the shower by Armand Davudian.

I shut my eyes under the scalding stream, scrubbing off last night's dream,

when suddenly I hear your voice again, as though it caught in the clogged drain

and was sent bubbling back up from the other world where

you're not my mother. This time it's really you. I'm really here. I blink. We do not disappear.

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop, so I don't need to stop just yet. And yet I do, unable to resume old customs, unlike you.

In a one-bath four-person household, we learn what we mustn't see,

growing in time so coolly intimate with one another silhouette behind the opaque frosted shower screen that once more

stands between us too. While at the mirror you apply foundation and concealer, I wash out my hair

with rosewater shampoo, which means I'll smell like you all day. Mama, I shout, I'm coming out.

And as you look away, I knot around me tight your lavender robe de chambre,

cinching my waist and clamber out of the tub,

...