Torrent

 

Blood guided through
the vast distances
of the body’s vessels

is, by definition, a migrant.

It doesn’t ride the air currents
like swallows
or monarchs.

No–

it flows through the body’s intimate arteries,
like salmon summoned home,
swimming against the current

through the torrents

of a river never twice the same,

always alive,
spilling inward,
held safe 

by the breath.

Who can claim to know
the precise location of their place of origin,
under a sky that spins?
on a planet that trembles?

Migrations renew the earth
beneath our skin.
The heart never asked
permission to beat.
Something within
always remembers its birthright,
its alignment with the sunrise.

Erythocytes never carried visas—
their permit: life.
Everything in their passage 

is bathed,
stained red
with boundless joy.

The ancestral current
never wanes, never stands still—
its forms keep recycling.

—Lorena Wolfman (2017, translated 2025)