Begin With a Breath...

Collect yourself in moments when

heavy doors close, in stairwells 

shadowed with absence, lit by quiet.

Slickened grounds make more of themselves

with your tears.

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You gather up inside you

droplets of you, names

bounce back from graphite walls

licks the chalk off brick,

swell you fatter and you

think of clouds you’d like to roll

I am tight in my shoulders

as I stand, hunched over

with my hands in the grains making myself

things that make me better.

Wishes go into spooned mixtures

thickening to thin.

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Super bright and golden, gives a streak

of safety through the closed window,

shoulders still forward and working

to take single things and turn them into

I watched how you soothed him, how you placed a hand on top of his, reached for it first on his thigh where it wasn’t. You searched with reflex at a word that years have taught you might unravel him. A word that was said to illustrate another’s story, one very different from his own, but the word had a sameness in its history, resounding in his quick heartbeat and stuck throat.

I still wear my old and worn bras so I can buy songs. The parts of me that need fixing, remain beneath - unseen, but stitched together temporarily, by voices braver and sweeter than my own.