I met her in the shelter-
sunset bleeding through curtains
thin as onion skin,
coffee breath, rising like a ghost,
a scarf at her throat knotted like a girl.
She said she wanted to die on that white floor.
Cheek pressed to porcelain,
her skull pictured cracking like cheap tile,
the vision circling her the way buzzards
circle a broken dog.
Glass sang through her apartment,
kitchen, hallway,
the sound of promise cracking its teeth.
She described the river of wine
creeping slow down a yellow wall,
apples rolling like lies
across the crooked floor.
Her wrist, she said, had no language now:
fingers slack, neck loose as an unlaced shoe.
She clawed for a phone perched on the sink-
nails on plastic - the phone’s arc, plunk - silence.
The world went out like a dropped bulb.
He flung their wedding flutes,
cards still tied: To a bright future. Much love.
He punched plaster until his knuckles bled.
She woke to the sound of him naming the room,
as if syllables could stake a claim.
“Take me home,” she whispered,
sick with sleep, sick with forgetting,
and the woman in me,
who knows the floor of grief,
leaned down in that wreckage
and braided her hair with dust.
She folded the scarf, smoothed her boots.
I could see what home had taught her:
to make herself small, to learn the shapes of staying.
I listened like a ledger, tallying bruises,
balancing bowls of soup.
In the margin of my ledger I wrote her name,
a balance carried forward.