12/3/22

When snow drapes the world,
I hear the echo of wings,
their flight a melody
I can no longer touch.

When the air fills with song,
I see the quiet fall of white,
its silence a ghost
pressed into memory.

I am always leaning—
toward what was,
what might be,
what should have been.

The moment,
no matter how it gleams,
slips through my hands
like water,
like wind.

---

12/5/24

Perhaps this is why I gather fragments,
why the glint of frost on a blade of grass
holds my gaze longer than the expanse of snow.
Why I follow the tilt of a bird’s head,
its small movements louder than the sky.

The whole of any moment
is too vast, too sharp—
a cacophony of light and sound
I cannot hold.

But in the minutia,
I find a silence I can bear,
a single thread
to keep my mind from unraveling.

Perhaps this is how I survive the present:
by breaking it into pieces

small enough to love, maybe,


small enough to leave.

The fossils hold no names,
no mourners to cradle their edges,
no elegies to weave their flight into memory.
And yet, they linger,
etched stubbornly into the earth’s spine,
defiant in their refusal to disappear.

The soil sings softly for them to yield,
to smooth their edges,
to fold into the quiet churn of becoming.
But they cling—
not to life,
but to the shape of it,
the weight of what they once were
locked in stone that pretends
it is still bone.

I press my hand to the ground,
feel the echo of their resistance,
and I know them,
for I too am a creature
carrying what time has asked me to release.
I too grip the brittle edges
of what is no longer,
keeping its form
even as it threatens to break me.

We are kin in this rebellion,
this quiet mutiny against forgetting.
Not because the world remembers us,
but because we remember it—
the curve of what was,
the ache of its passing,
the shape of a weight
that cannot be returned.


                     Not alive.


           Not gone.

                                    Only refusing to let go.

I draw maps on the inside of my skin,  
inked in the color of vanishing.  
Here lies the boundary of what was ours,  
eroded by the tide of unspoken.  
The compass spins, untethered,  
its needle trembling toward absence.  

Do you hear the silence?  
It is not quiet—  
it claws at the air,  
each gasp a hymn to what’s been torn.  
The walls hum with the echoes of us,  
a dissonant symphony,  
the architecture of breaking.  

You left your shadow folded neatly,  
tucked in the corner of my ribcage.  
I wear it like a second heart,  
beating out of time,  
a phantom rhythm that sways  
to the cadence of your departure.  

The sky is a wound tonight,  
its dark edges stitched with stars,  
each pinprick of light  
a question I can’t stop asking.  
The moon doesn’t answer,  
its face turned away,  
familiar as grief, distant as god.  

And what of the map I made for you?  
You’ve burned it—  
I smell the ashes in my dreams,  
see the charred remains in the curve of my palm.  
Still, my fingers trace the routes,  
as if I might find you  
in the spaces between now and never,  
as if I might follow the lines  
to the horizon where
You  
and this world  
could have coexisted.

Why are you here?
Hiding in the stolen moments,
The glances of left and right,
Just behind my eye’s corner

Your love is still felt
Brushed against my fingers
When I reach for anything
Like feathers on silk

You haunt me,
A ghost of memories,
Of our little time together.
How are you still alive?

When the sun sinks low,
and the world dissolves into its own dark,
does the shadow mourn the light,
its purpose stolen by the stars?
Or does it slip away unseen,
folding itself into corners
only the forgotten can reach?

Does it dream of being whole—
not the absence of something
but something itself,
a figure unbound
from the body it mimics?

When dawn stretches its golden fingers,
does the shadow flinch,
or does it rise in quiet obedience,
grateful for another day of following,
of existing only as a reflection
of what it can never become?

And when no one is watching,
does the shadow step ahead
just once,
to feel what it’s like
to be?

Seeds, too, were surrounded by darkness
before they became anew—
held close by the quiet earth,
pressed into silence so deep
it swallowed the memory of the sky.

Did they mourn the light they had never known?
Did they fear the weight above them,
or trust the unknowable forces
that buried them so?

And when they split themselves apart,
breaking open to grow,
was it with joy,
or was it pain
that gave way to life?

What, then, of us?

There is an animal beneath the skin,
soft-footed and silent.
It does not howl or claw;
it listens,
ears tuned to the pulse
of roots moving underground.

It does not speak our language,
but it hums to the rhythm
of wind slipping through leaves,
to the measured breath of the ocean
meeting the shore.

When you sit still enough,
you can feel it stir:
a gentle shifting in your chest,
a reminder of what you once knew—
the scent of rain before it falls,
the way the earth holds you
even when you forget its name.

It is patient,
this quiet creature,
its heartbeat slow and steady,
a tether to a time
when nothing needed to be said
to be understood.

But it waits,
not for anger,
not for hunger,
but for the moment
when stillness becomes unbearable—
when the weight of silence cracks
and the soft becomes sharp.

One day, it will claw its way free,
not with violence,
but with certainty,
a slow emergence from the dark.

You will feel it rise,
not as a battle,
but as a birth.
It will stand, uncoiling,
and you will find yourself
on your knees,
pressing your face to the ground,
finally remembering
what it means
to belong.