She sang for me—sweet, syrupy notes,
each vow a stone she polished bright.
I wore that armor, dull and ill-fitted,
knew its dents by heart: Mercy’s cleft, Doubt’s ridge.
No sword—just her quiet blame.
Now she runs, trailing sonnets lit like fuse wire—
I love you a detonation in my ribs.
No gloves, her knuckles raw from grafting epithets:
Coward. Stain. You’re a bruise—not bruised.
Her guilt blooms fungal in my marrow,
a rot she calls communion. I call it knot—
the kind you can’t untie, just carry.
What truth? Only this:
love too close becomes the wedge
that splits the spine of every yes
into a chorus of not yet, not quite, not.
Her father’s guilt wore faces of many men:
liquid ghosts who slurred sermons at the kitchen table,
their glass bodies sweating rings into the wood.
He taught her love is a language
drowned in amber, swallowed to forget.
Her mother’s spine bent like a question mark—
a woman who mistook silence for shelter,
her tenderness a garden left unwatered.
She inherited roots that clawed upward,
thirsty for light but choked by the shade
of allowance, apology, stay.
Siblings? Laughter fossilized in dust.
The house kept a hollow where their voices once hummed—
a hive of ghosts she’d whisper to at night,
her childhood a museum of closed doors.
She learned to cradle shame like glass—
fragile, sharp, and she dropped into my hands,
her lover, saying hold this as blood pooled between my fingers.
She turned every stay into a shiv.
She built galleries of blame, hung with portraits of me
whose only crime was seeing her too clearly.
Love was a mask she wore too tight,
its edges cutting crescents into her cheeks.
She hid the rot of guilt passed as bread,
offered communion wine soured to vinegar.
She hurled stones labeled This is strength, It’s your fault,
smooth from years of rehearsing blame.
She left fingerprints rusted on doorknobs,
sonnets scribbled in ash on the kitchen floor.
Armor became her gospel; she clasped it
to guard the hollow. She refused the weight
of another’s gaze, the risk of being named beloved
without flinching.
She feared mirrors. She saw fractured glass,
a reflection too jagged to hold.
She broke every yes at the spine,
splitting it into not yet, not quite, not.
She hummed stay. What she meant: run.
What remained: the marrow of almost—
a hollow where love’s name gnawed its own tail,
a wound she dressed in hymns of if only,
a knot she could not untie, only tighten
until it strangled every hand that reached.
Then—one day—the glass did not shatter.
It bent.
A voice (hers, but deeper) said:
You are not your acts. You are not your wounds.
You are the hand that drops the stone,
and the hand that gathers the shards.
The match that strikes, and the ashes that remain.
She finally saw her galleries of blame—dusty, warped—
were built from timber she’d stripped from her own ribs.
The saints and shields were just men, kneeling
in not their own glass, but hers.
She unlearned the lie that love is a test she’d fail.
The rot she’d called communion was hunger
she’d mistaken for feast. The stones, her guilt,
her shame, her own deceit. Her goal, to gain
what didn’t need taken, but given—her criticism, redirected.
She rebuilt walls, yes—but with doors.
A labyrinth where love could wander
without losing itself. Boundaries not to imprison,
but to say: Here, I am soft. Here, I am steel.
She returned the stones, now seeds. The ash, now ink.
Her hands, once sieves, now cupped to hold
the light leaking through others’ cracks.
What remained:
The marrow of almost, now a scaffold—
not a hollow, but a vessel.
Guilt, no longer a rot, but a root.
And every not yet, not quite, not
softened to soon, almost, now.
The labyrinth she built to escape them
is the one she trapped herself in.
Their ghosts? Hers now. Their rot? Her roots.
Press your palm to the glass.
What you’ll see:
not a saint, not a shield,
but a child clutching shards
she swore she’d never drop.
What you’ll hear:
not you will ruin, but you can rebuild.
This is not absolution.
This is the marrow:
the rot that fed you,
the roots that split you,
the walls that hid you
are the same hands
that can dig you out.
Turn the stones to seeds.
Let the ghosts become soil.
Let your voice, fossilized and frail,
hum the anthem of the pines:
*Bend. Grow. Begin.