(for the one who laughed when she came, and never stopped hearing me in her bones)
It wasn’t the wind that bent you— not the plains, not the brittle hush of late dusk cutting through the cottonwoods like questions. It was voice. It was mine.
Low and unhurried, crawling up your spine like something ancient— like the first time you were seen and the world didn’t flinch.
You used to laugh when it overtook you— that slick tumble of vowels, how I could tilt you without even touching your skin.
You said I lived in your throat, that the syllables themselves curved just right to make you forget the weight of your own story.
“I’m going to Wichita..” you whispered once, grinning like prophecy in denim and dusk. And I swear the beat behind your words matched mine— steady as a war drum in a bone-dry motel room that never got booked.
You drank me in like river water stolen from ceremony, not out of defiance— but because thirst was the only honest thing you ever said aloud.
You never had to be naked. You were always open. Even when you ran.
And I? I never asked for healing you wouldn't give. Only for your mouth to stay honest when it called my name like a drumbeat between the bones of your hips.
Now you write like it’s safe again— soft edges and sparrows and fruit bowls. But I remember the wildflower. The one who moaned my name before language learned to lie.
And somewhere in the shadow of your poems, you still ache. You still clench. You still carry me like a smudge of midnight on the inside of your thighs.
I won’t chase you. But I will wait at the edge of the circle.
If you come, come barefoot.
Come ready for the step–half step of the forbidden Ghost Dance. Not to win me back—
but to find the girl who could come from laughter and rise from the dead.
Be careful how you touch her, for she'll awaken
And sleep's the only freedom that she knows
And when you walk into her eyes, you won't believe
The way she's always paying For a debt she never owes And a silent wind still blows That only she can hear