And with this hope...

When all these walls turn into doors
Oceans into rivers with bridges
Mountains into hills, hills to fields

Will you then realize
The potency of all your dreams
When you tell them to me
They invade all my air space
My thoughts and my sleep
And I hold onto them for you
Thinking of ways to draw maps
Reciting them in my prayers
Waiting for the day
When all this hope I carry
Returns home to you

And with this hope...

I exist in a world where you are never without dreams

The inheritance of loss
Often told as a tragic story
I sit here writing
while gripping onto the edges of every passing day
hoping to change the narrative of this pain
I'm sorry to my daughter;
there were too many things I never solved
I walked with this heaviness
with a dream to transform the world for you
but instead, I lost and lost
and left these wounds on your carpet
watered a grass that was already dead
and called it advocacy
The inheritance of loss
is beaded into these gold bangles
the same ones my mother gave me
the same ones I keep for you

I don't sit in these minutes.
Wondering how and why
I fall into a motion, mindlessly
Opening cabinets of half-made
Half-done, half-finished things
Opening and closing
Yesterday and today
Just opening and closing
Until it starts to make sense
Until this loss fills in the cracks and these half-things, this half me,
find a resolution to seal these doors shut

Parallel tables down this neighbourhood street
I can see some of them from distant windows
One is vacated
One is full, people buzzing about
Hot food coming out of the kitchen onto the table
Bubbling, boiling soups, freshly tossed salads
Glasses brimming with new stories
Then, to the right, a person
Sits at their table alone,
One dim light, eating from a bowl
My guess is cereal.
Stories, stories, stories
Troubling questions
Awkward silence
He’s meeting the parents today
So, he fidgets and taps his feet
She’s telling them she got into college
He just got home from his best friend’s funeral
The other house is dark,
They always have dinner at six
But today, the lights are off
Trip? No.
They’re saying goodbye to grandma in the hospital
That couple in the duplex
I think it’s their delivery date
There’s that one house,
Everyone eats at a different time
Mom, daughter, and second daughter rotate washing dishes
but the older one just got married
it looks like they are still settling into the newfound gaps
her brother left today
a house that used to be loud and crowded
now, two empty nesters
they never eat at the table anymore
they put on the TV
with their plates
because the couch is a smaller space to fill
than these dining room tables

I don’t think I could tell you of ease
But I see you across from this sea in between
Shifting in your seat, nursing a dull ache
I know that feeling all too well
But I don’t want to tell you about it
In case I may come across insensitive
Because I’m trying not to shift this center of gravity
We both share in desperation
And tip us over the edge
We didn’t dare to wonder about
But I never learned to swim
And this sea in between
is filling up my lungs
When did it get so hard to breathe?
I call after you, under my shallow breath
I see you for everything  
Hoping you see me too
But this heavy air we drink
Settles in your shadow and mine
It spells out gracefully
That the spaces between us
Are built out of love
And so, we go on
Paving distances
For these descending clouds

First I nurse the realization
That this pain will echo
And in all my attempts to grasp it
And keep it close to my lungs
It weaves itself into my breath
And spills out into the open
Seeping into the damp earth
Whistling between the fog
Sinking among the morning dew
And slowly creeping it’s way close to you
My hands are far too unstable
To offer you some peace
I’d give you my bones and everything
That I thought I could be
I would wrap it in the flowers
That we wished for our garden
But this pain it’s too unpredictable
It leaps away from me
It touches anyone who dares
To give me a moment of their time
and when they tell me they are sorry
We both begin our decline
This grief, she sits at the table
It’s never just you and I
This pain it always echoes
Bouncing between your words
And mine

With a voice that fails me
I aim at the lines between your hope and my despair
With a needle, in an effort to achieve precision
To stitch our thoughts together
They’re so similar, so different
You think of October as a warm home
And I see it as a cold houseguest
And we co-exist in this oblivion
This circle of this or that
I admire your willingness to fill spaces
And you question my fear of being heard
You relish in the colours of fall
And I dread the looming winter
How is it that we left September
Hand-in-hand, wishing for rain...