Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Blog

  • Groundhog Day

    As I’m writing this
    I’m looking at both of them
    and they are completely passed out

    Not asleep

    Passed out

    Like they worked a double shift
    paid a mortgage
    argued with the electric company
    stood in line at the bank
    and came home with lower back pain

    People say cats sleep all day
    and then become active at night

    No

    Not these two

    These two sleep in the morning
    sleep in the afternoon
    sleep at night
    wake up slightly offended
    walk a few feet
    eat
    use the litter box
    fight
    and go right back to sleep

    That is their whole schedule

    I really think they sleep twenty hours
    and the other four
    are just basic survival
    and unnecessary violence

    They are senior cats now
    so everything they do
    feels slower
    smaller
    but somehow still very serious

    The bowl
    The water
    The blanket
    The window

    The same spot
    where the sun comes in
    like it owns the place
    and still owes them rent

    They return to it every day
    like old people
    going to the same café
    because why change now

    And then—of course
    there is the full moon

    I don’t always know
    there is a full moon

    Sometimes I come home
    and know before
    I even look outside

    There are clumps of hair
    on the floor

    Not a little shedding

    Clumps

    A substantial amount

    Light hair
    Dark hair

    Enough to know
    their violence is real

    Enough to know
    who won

    Usually the girl

    My son’s cat
    The daughter

    The other one is her father
    which makes the whole thing
    even more ridiculous

    A father-daughter duo
    with the most dysfunctional relationship
    in the house

    He loses most of the time

    She does not care for him

    Not even a little

    She has been sick of him
    for years

    And still

    There they are

    Sleeping near each other
    Eating near each other
    Fighting under the moon
    like they have some contract
    none of us were allowed to read

    People give cats a bad name
    but cats are incredible companions

    They really are

    They don’t make a production out of love

    They don’t need to be praised
    for staying

    They just stay

    They choose the room you are in
    They learn your footsteps
    They know when you come home

    They sit close enough
    to keep you company
    and far enough
    to pretend it was their idea

    And honestly
    I understand that

    The older I get
    the more I understand
    living in intervals

    Wake up
    Drink water
    Move around
    Try to eat
    Rest
    Survive the weather
    Survive the moon
    Start again

    Some days
    that is the whole thing

    Not a breakthrough
    Not a revelation

    Just the body
    doing what it knows
    while the heart catches up

    So I look at them now
    both completely gone to the world
    like life has asked too much
    and they are done answering

    And I love them

    Their old bones
    Their terrible attitudes
    Their little wars
    Their strange loyalty

    The way they return
    to the same places
    again and again

    as if peace
    is not somewhere else

    As if the house
    even quiet
    even changed
    even under a full moon

    is still worth circling

    Still worth sleeping in

    Still worth waking for

  • And I Cried

    The day arrived dark
    heavy with water
    as if the sky had lowered
    its whole blue body
    into my chest

    And I cried

    I cried the way rain cries
    without shame
    without apology
    falling because it must fall

    There are feelings
    that do not fit in the hands

    There are sorrows
    too alive
    to be sealed away

    So I let them come

    The window blurred

    The trees bowed

    The world became water

    And then, slowly
    the sun returned

    Not as a miracle
    But like a hand
    finding my face
    after I had forgotten
    I still had one

    Light touched the wet leaves

    It entered the room
    It found me there
    still breathing
    still woman
    still mine

    So I wiped my tears away

    Not because the ache was gone

    Not because love had become simple

    Not because my heart
    had grown quiet

    I wiped them away
    because I belong to myself
    before I belong
    to any sorrow

    Because I have carried storms
    and still opened my doors

    Because even after rain
    the earth does not apologize
    for shining

    And neither will I

    The clouds had their mouth
    against my skin

    Now the sun
    comes back for me

  • More Sky in Her

    Trying to grasp their maturity
    is thrilling
    in a way I still cannot understand

    No one tells you this

    They tell you about the leaving
    the empty rooms
    the quiet house
    the laundry becoming smaller
    the food lasting longer
    than it should

    But no one tells you
    what happens after

    How your world
    reconditions itself

    How one day
    you speak to your son
    and hear a man answer back

    How his voice
    carries the weight
    of his brother’s voice too
    and for a second
    you are standing
    inside both of them

    These men
    have surpassed my height

    They are broad now
    Deep-voiced now
    Private now
    Their lives moving
    with a force
    that no longer needs
    my hands

    And still
    they began in me

    That is the part
    that makes me almost dizzy

    They were once
    a flutter
    a hunger
    a foot beneath my ribs
    a name I had not yet learned
    how to call across a room

    Now they stand in the world
    as if gravity
    belongs to them

    And I stand here
    trying to understand
    how something can leave you
    and still make you larger

    How love can grow taller
    than the body
    that carried it

    How a mother
    can be emptied
    and expanded
    at the same time

    No one tells you
    that after they leave
    you do not become less
    of a mother

    You become a mother
    with more sky in her

  • Stayed Behind

    I know he is not my forever

    It took me until tonight
    to understand that

    And strangely

    it was not grief I felt

    It was peace

    Maybe because
    I have been preparing
    for this
    my entire life

    First a country

    I left it once
    and it never stopped
    leaving me

    Then my father

    I thought the earth
    might have the decency
    to pause for a moment

    It didn’t

    Then the years
    when my sons
    still reached for my hand

    At some point
    you understand

    that loving something

    and keeping it

    are two entirely different miracles

    The other day
    I found one long
    bright strand of my hair
    resting against his shirt

    I reached for it

    He looked down
    and softly said

    be careful with that

    I have carried those words
    around ever since

    Because for one impossible second

    it seemed to me

    that it was not the hair at all

    It was some quiet part of myself

    the daughter

    the mother

    the woman who survived
    all those leavings

    that had crossed the distance
    between two people

    and chosen

    without asking me

    to remain

    I know he is not my forever

    But I think tonight
    I finally understood

    that forever

    was never the thing
    I was looking for

    I think

    I only wanted proof

    that after losing

    a country

    a father

    and the years
    when my sons
    still reached for my hand

    there was still
    some living part of me

    capable

    of leaving itself

    behind

  • Growing Wings

    My father loved cardinals.

    He said they carried something the other birds did not, as if a little piece of the evening sun had decided to grow wings.

    After it rains, they are always the first ones I notice.

    Not singing.
    Just there, red against the washed-out branches, waiting for the world to collect itself again.

    I think love must be something like that.

    Not the storm.
    Not the breaking.

    The small, stubborn thing that returns afterward.

    The earth breathing its deep green breath.
    The wet leaves shining
    like they have been forgiven.

    The quiet that settles over everything
    not empty, just healed enough to begin again.

    I stand outside my door
    and watch the cardinal
    tilt its head toward the sky, and for one unbearable second
    I cannot tell
    whether I am missing my father or simply remembering
    that nature grieves too.

    Maybe that is all love ever was

    not holding on

    but returning

    again and again

    to the places
    where something beautiful
    once lived.

  • Outside my Door

    This morning
    I watered the plants
    matched the last two socks
    and found a bird
    building a nest
    inside an old Christmas tree

    My youngest son
    said he would put it away
    before he left

    That was January

    It is June now

    Three little birds
    are waiting to be fed
    and somewhere
    my own child
    is learning
    how to live
    without me

    The coffee got cold

    The laundry
    is still in the dryer

    The birds
    do not know
    they have built their home
    inside a holiday

    I do not know
    when my son
    will come home again.

    It occurs to me
    that perhaps
    this was all
    a simple life

    ever meant to be—

    loving something enough

    to let it leave

    and leaving enough behind

    for something else

    to call it home

  • Missing Socks

    The dryer has gone off three times.

    Possibly four.

    At this point the clothes and I are participating in the same cycle.

    They cool off.

    I remember them.

    I turn the dryer back on.

    We begin again.

    Do you ever get so tired that the idea of going to bed feels completely unreasonable?

    Not because you’re busy.

    Not because you’re doing anything important.

    You simply cannot fathom peeling yourself off the sofa.

    The strange thing is that since my sons moved out, I have matched every single sock.

    Every one.

    For years, socks disappeared with such consistency that I assumed there was some sort of portal inside the dryer.

    Now?

    Nothing.

    Perfect numerical accountability.

    Every sock returns home.

    Which leads me to conclude that the disappearance of children from a house can, in fact, be measured in missing socks.

    I don’t know where they went.

    The children, thankfully, I know.

    The socks remain a mystery.

    Anyway.

    The laundry is still in the dryer.

    I am still on the sofa.

    And if you’re reading this instead of doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing

    welcome.

    You’re among friends.

  • My Mother

    My mother and I share the same blood.

    B Rh-negative.

    The same rare inheritance.

    The same river moving through us.

    The same red history traveling from one body into another.

    She carried me beneath her heart for nine months.

    An entire season of becoming.

    Blood teaching blood how to assemble itself.

    Bone finding bone.

    A spine.

    A mouth.

    Ten fingers opening toward a life neither of us had seen.

    She made my body.

    This is no small thing.

    The original shelter.

    The dark and sacred room where I began.

    But the older I become the more I understand that being born from someone does not guarantee being understood by them.

    The womb creates a body.

    It does not necessarily create recognition.

    My mother and I share the same blood.

    B Rh-negative.

    The same rare inheritance.

    And still, we spent years trying to find a language large enough to hold us both.

    My mother spoke.

    God, how she spoke.

    Stories.

    Worries.

    Grievances.

    Disappointments.

    The thousand daily abrasions of being alive.

    She sat me down and handed me pieces of adulthood long before I was large enough to carry them.

    And because I loved her

    I did.

    I listened.

    I absorbed.

    I learned the weather patterns of another person’s sorrow before I had learned my own.

    I became her witness.

    Her companion.

    Her sounding board.

    The child at the other end of conversations meant for grown women.

    Perhaps that is why language became my native country.

    Why I reach for words the way other people reach for prayer.

    Why I cannot leave a question unanswered.

    A feeling unnamed.

    A loose thread hanging from the hem of a perfectly good life.

    I learned early that everything must be examined.

    Everything discussed.

    Everything understood.

    And I am tired.

    Not of my mother.

    Never of my mother.

    I love her.

    Love has never been the problem.

    The problem is that love and understanding are often mistaken for twins when they are merely neighbors.

    So we spent years waving to one another across a distance neither of us knew how to cross.

    Then there was my father.

    A man who seemed perpetually occupied by some private cosmic adventure.

    A man of so few words that silence gathered around him like a second skin.

    Yet I could sit beside him for an entire afternoon and feel more understood than I did in conversations that lasted years.

    He never asked me to carry his grief.

    Never handed me the weight of his interior life.

    He simply made room for mine.

    And when he died everyone assumed I was grieving a father.

    What I was grieving was recognition.

    The rare miracle of being witnessed without explanation.

    Without performance.

    Without the exhausting labor of translating myself into a language someone else might finally understand.

    Perhaps that is why unfinished things haunt me.

    Why I pull every thread.

    Why I interrogate every silence.

    Why I stand before mysteries demanding they surrender their meaning.

    I spent my childhood holding one end of conversations that never seemed to end.

    Of course I grew into a woman who wants answers.

    Of course I became someone who believes every story deserves a conclusion.

    But lately

    I am beginning to suspect

    that not everything unfinished

    is broken.

    That not every silence is withholding something.

    That some people love us through language.

    And others through presence.

    That understanding sometimes arrives speaking.

    And sometimes arrives and simply sits beside you.

    The same blood does not guarantee recognition.

    The same house does not guarantee understanding.

    And yet—

    love persists.

    My mother and I

    still waving across the distance.

    My father gone and somehow still answering me.

    The child I was

    standing between them

    learning two different dialects of devotion.

    One made of words.

    One made of silence.

    And all these years later

    I am still trying to become fluent in both.

  • Moon Water

    Last night I left a glass of water beneath the moon.

    What else was I supposed to do with all that longing?

    By then the ache had become atmospheric.

    It occupied every room.

    Followed me from place to place.

    Even appetite abandoned me.

    For days I had mistaken silence for conclusion.

    A closed door for a vanished house.

    The moon remained behind the maple trees.

    The water remained beneath the moon.

    And I went to bed carrying a grief

    I had not yet earned.

    By morning the glass was still there.

    But not entirely.

    A small amount missing.

    Just enough to make wonder more persuasive than certainty.

    I drank it anyway.

    The whole glass.

    And then something stranger happened.

    The catastrophe I had been preparing for failed to arrive.

    The mausoleum stood empty.

    The flowers had no recipient.

    The eulogy had lost its audience.

    I had spent days mourning something that was still alive.

    Last night I left a glass of water beneath the moon.

    What else was I supposed to do

    with all that longing?

    This morning the glass weighed less.

    By evening, so did I.

  • Unanswered

    I have always survived
    by making meaning.

    By turning grief
    into something that could be carried.

    But this—

    Every answer
    contains its opposite.

    Every certainty
    collapses under inspection.

    And there is a particular kind of sorrow in watching an unanswered thing

    slowly amputate

    the joy of language.

  • Women of Salt

    It never took much to fill my stomach.

    I thought that was simply the way I was.

    A small appetite.

    A child satisfied easily.

    Years later I understood that hunger had already been negotiated long before the plate reached me.

    The women in my family were experts at subtraction.

    A little less for themselves.

    A little more for everyone else.

    No announcements.

    No speeches.

    No visible sacrifice.

    Just small adjustments made so often they became invisible.

    A spoonful here.

    A portion there.

    A second helping quietly redirected.

    The mathematics of survival.

    I never noticed it as a child.

    Children rarely do.

    I thought food simply appeared.

    I thought dinner was dinner.

    I thought everyone lived this way.

    I did not understand that somewhere between the kitchen and the table, someone had already decided I would eat first.

    This was Cuba.

    Not the Cuba in photographs.

    Not the Cuba tourists carried home in their suitcases.

    A society of shortages.

    Food shortages.

    Soap shortages.

    Fuel shortages.

    Power outages that arrived without warning.

    The endless improvisation required to survive them.

    And yet the women continued.

    They always continued.

    I remember entire aisles filled with Russian canned meat.

    The same can.

    Again and again.

    Shelf after shelf.

    As though variety itself had become a luxury.

    As though eating anything else had ever been an option.

    At the time none of it felt strange.

    Children accept the reality they are given.

    The astonishing becomes ordinary very quickly.

    I remember ash being gathered and sifted through cloth until only the finest powder remained.

    No splinters.

    No debris.

    Only a soft gray dust.

    Then the dishes were washed with it.

    Astonishing, but true.

    The meal fed the family.

    The fire cooked the meal.

    The ashes cleaned the plates.

    Nothing was wasted.

    Not food.

    Not labor.

    Not a single useful thing.

    I remember the ash beneath their fingernails.

    The smell of smoke that never seemed to leave their clothes.

    The certainty with which they moved through scarcity.

    As though survival were not remarkable.

    As though it were simply what morning required.

    Looking back, I realize they treated themselves the same way.

    Reducing here.

    Stretching there.

    Giving and giving until very little remained.

    And somehow still finding enough to offer.

    Perhaps that is why it never took much to fill my stomach.

    I was eating from portions made larger by the hunger of women who loved me.

    I miss these women.

    More than I know how to explain.

    Not because they were perfect.

    Not because they never failed.

    Because they understood things I am only now beginning to understand.

    The quiet negotiations of love.

    The invisible mathematics of survival.

    The dignity of continuing.

    I see every version of myself in them.

    The woman who worries.

    The woman who nurtures.

    The woman who remembers.

    The woman who gives more than she should.

    The woman who keeps going.

    Sometimes I think inheritance has very little to do with what we are given.

    Perhaps inheritance is recognition.

    The sudden realization that the people we miss never truly leave.

    They remain in our gestures.

    In our habits.

    In the way we love.

    In the way we endure.

    Today I feel as though I lived a life only fiction could properly explain.

    Not because it was tragic.

    Not because it was beautiful.

    Because it was both at once.

    The kind of life where dishes were washed with ashes.

    Where store shelves repeated the same can until repetition itself became abundance.

    Where women performed miracles and called it chores.

    The women in my family were made of salt.

    ‘Women of Salt’

    The proof was everywhere.

    In the sweat.

    In the sea surrounding the island.

    In the meals that appeared when there should have been none.

    In the hands that gave more than they kept.

    In the quiet arithmetic that took place before every meal.

    And when I look closely enough, I find them everywhere.

    Including myself.

  • Two of You

    There must be two of you.

    The discovery arrived this evening with such certainty that I nearly laughed. Not because it surprised me. Because it explained so much.

    For months I had been under the mistaken impression that I was speaking to only one man.

    Meanwhile, an entire second population appeared to be living inside him.

    One of them leaves fingerprints on the soul.

    The other continues through the day.

    One enters a room carrying enough electricity to alter the arrangement of furniture.

    The other returns home without a trace of ash.

    Both seem equally convinced of their authenticity.

    At 8:46 p.m.

    I placed my head out the window and watched darkness collect itself in the trees.

    The wind carrying the scent of rain that had fallen elsewhere, and I found myself wondering whether the two of you know each other.

    Whether one sends letters to the other.

    Whether they pass each other in narrow hallways.

    Whether one ever pauses at the sound of the other’s footsteps.

    I hope they do.

    I hope they sit together and exchange stories.

    Otherwise —

    I cannot imagine the loneliness.

    And for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps I had been mistaken.

    There are not two versions of you.

    There are simply two men sharing the same address.

    One arrives carrying fire.

    The other arrives Tuesday.

    And suddenly the mystery was no longer how they existed.

    The mystery was how they survived each other.

    How they shared the same life.

    How one biography contained them both.

    I felt tired suddenly.

    Not for myself.

    For them.

    And then for you.

    Because I have spent my entire life being only one person.

    Which is exhausting enough.

    The wind moved through the trees.

    And I wondered if the man who stood in my house ever misses the other one.

    If, on certain evenings he catches sight of him crossing the distance.

    A familiar silhouette.

    A shadow carrying fire.

    Gone before he can call out.

    Perhaps that is why I have always felt a tenderness for birds.

    They leave.

    But they leave whole.

    The wing does not migrate separately from the sky.

    The song does not arrive three days after the bird.

    Nothing is divided.

    Nothing remains behind to haunt the trees.

    And there, with my head resting in the open night, I arrived at a thought so gentle it almost escaped me.

    Tonight I felt tired for you.

    Not because I finally understood you.

    Quite the opposite.

    Because I realized both men were real.

    And somehow, beneath the same name, behind the same eyes, inside the same life, they continue forward together.

    Otherwise—

    I cannot imagine the loneliness.

  • Fatherlight

    Your face was not a face

    It was morning itself

    The kind of morning
    that arrives before grief

    Before the knowledge
    that fathers can die

    I kept trying to look at you

    But the light was too bright

    As though love
    after all these years
    had finally become visible

    And then you held me

    The way fathers hold daughters
    when there is nothing left to explain

    No language

    No questions

    No unfinished sorrow

    Only the certainty
    of your arms around me

    I woke hours ago

    Yet something remains

    The light has followed me
    into this afternoon

    It rests quietly
    over everything

    Over the silence

    Over the ache

    Over this ordinary day
    unfolding exactly as days do

    The room is ordinary

    The world is ordinary

    But I am not entirely here

    Some part of me
    is still standing
    inside that light

    Still breathing
    the scent of starch
    from your shirt

    Still trying to look at you

    Still closing my eyes
    against that unbearable brightness

    Still your daughter

    And for the first time
    in a very long time

    the silence does not feel empty

    It feels illuminated

  • Vestige

    When I first opened my eyes

    I was not entirely awake

    Nor entirely asleep

    I still do not know

    which side of consciousness

    I occupied

    Only that he was there

    My father

    Or the memory of him

    Or whatever remains of love

    after the body has gone

    I saw him

    Or perhaps I felt him first

    The unmistakable scent

    of a freshly ironed shirt

    Cotton

    Starch

    Warmth

    The fragrance of a man

    who believed appearances mattered

    who pressed his collars carefully

    who stepped into the world

    with dignity buttoned to his throat

    And then

    something happened

    that language still struggles to hold

    I felt his love

    Not remembered love

    Present love

    The kind that exists

    when a child collapses into a parent’s arms

    and discovers

    that fear cannot follow them there

    I could not see his face

    Every time I tried

    the light became unbearable

    Not painful

    Just impossibly bright

    I would lift my eyes

    and immediately close them again

    Overcome

    Not by fear

    By radiance

    As though love itself

    had become too luminous

    for ordinary sight

    So I stopped trying to see

    And instead

    I rested against him

    Against the crisp cotton

    of his freshly ironed shirt

    Against the familiar scent

    of starch

    and home

    I buried my face there

    the way children do

    when they have cried enough

    And suddenly

    there was no grief

    No loneliness

    No years

    No death

    Only peace

    The kind that asks for nothing

    The kind that explains nothing

    The kind that simply wraps itself

    around a wounded heart

    and says

    rest now

    I do not know

    if I dreamed him

    I do not know

    if the mind

    hungry for comfort

    created the moment itself

    I only know

    that when I woke

    the feeling remained

    The warmth remained

    The certainty remained

    And for one impossible instant

    the distance between the living

    and the dead

    felt no thicker

    than a bedsheet

    lifting in morning light

    I never saw his face

    But somehow

    that is not what stayed with me

    What stayed

    was the embrace

    The starch on his shirt

    The scent of being loved

    The overwhelming brightness

    And the strange understanding

    that after all these years

    what I missed most

    was not my father’s face

    It was the feeling

    of being his daughter

  • Unread II

    And so

    I come here

    Digitally bent
    with exhaustion

    From you

    From myself

    From the endless labor
    of translating a life
    into something a stranger might recognize as their own

    And from those who read me

    My faithful witnesses

    The ones who have learned
    the weather of my language

    Who know when a bird
    is not a bird

    When a doorway
    is grief

    When rain
    is longing wearing a disguise

    When a wound
    has simply changed its name

    They follow the migration
    from the literal
    into something far more alive

    Not metaphor as decoration

    Metaphor as resurrection

    The ordinary transformed
    until it begins breathing

    Until a chair becomes absence

    A house becomes memory

    A river becomes devotion

    A single feather
    becomes an entire human life
    trying to lift itself
    from the earth

    And what astonishes me still

    Is that they come

    Again and again

    Not to consume the story

    To inhabit it

    To leave pieces of themselves
    between the lines

    To recognize a sorrow
    I believed belonged only to me

    And somehow return it less lonely

    There is a sacredness in that

    A quiet exchange

    The oldest miracle I know

    One human being saying

    I have never lived your life

    And yet I know this room

    Perhaps that is why
    I remain faithful to language

    Even when it disappoints me

    Even when it fails
    to cross the distance

    Even when I place
    the most tender thing I possess
    into another person’s hands

    And hear only silence

    Still

    I cannot abandon it

    A bird does not abandon the sky

    A river does not abandon the sea

    And I do not know
    how to abandon words

    They have carried me too far

    Buried too many dead

    Lit too many darkened rooms

    Kept me alive
    through too many winters

    So I arrive here
    carrying another fragment

    Another shard of light

    Another unfinished prayer

    Not because I possess answers

    Because I possess language

    And language

    When offered honestly creates a bridge
    where there was only distance

    A lantern
    where there was only dark

    A witness
    where there was only solitude

    Perhaps that is why I continue

    Not for publication

    Not for praise

    Not even for understanding

    I continue because somewhere beyond this glowing screen someone is waiting for the exact shape of a sentence that will make them feel less alone inside their own becoming

    And if I can give them that

    even once

    then every unread letter

    every unanswered question

    every mile I have traveled
    through the wilderness of myself has not been wasted

    Because despite everything, despite the silences, despite the distances, despite all that language cannot save

    I still believe

    it saves something

    and sometimes

    something

    is enough

  • Unread

    I am grieving the absence of language

    Not because I enjoy words

    Not because I write poems

    Because language is the organ through which I experience existence

    Remove it, and I bleed internally

    I have spent my life translating pain into something survivable

    How I buried the dead

    How I loved the living

    How I crossed impossible distances
    without moving an inch

    When my father died
    language sat beside me

    When loneliness hollowed out entire rooms, language remained

    When I could not carry the weight of my own life, language carried part of it for me

    I have always made homes from words

    Built shelters from sentences

    Lit lanterns against darkness with nothing more than a line of poetry

    Even now

    Standing in the aftermath of my own confession

    I reach instinctively toward words

    The way a drowning creature reaches toward air

    Because language is not the record of my life

    Language is my life

    And lately

    For the first time I can remember

    I have been unable to find a single sentence
    large enough to hold what is happening to me

    That frightens me more than the thing itself

  • The Plumage of Joy

    Wounds rarely arrive looking like wounds

    They arrive wearing the plumage of joy

    Bright-throated

    Beautiful

    Perched innocently upon the branch as though they have always belonged there

    They sing

    And because the song is lovely

    The bird draws nearer

    Because the song is lovely

    The bird forgets caution

    Because the song is lovely

    The bird opens its wings

    Who fears a beautiful bird?

    Who closes the gate against a creature singing?

    Who suspects that something so luminous might one day be found nesting among the ribs?

    By the time I understood

    It had already learned my name

    The Plumage of Joy
    Graphite – Charcoal

    It took me days to draw the bird

    At first its face was wrong

    The beak distorted

    The proportions impossible

    I erased and erased until the paper began carrying its own ghosts

    Something kept resisting recognition

    Now I know what it was

    I was drawing the wound

    Not the wound itself

    But the creature carrying it

    The tears came long before the drawing was finished

    They arrived quietly then settled over everything

    Every memory darkened beneath them

    Every kindness grew wings

    Every ordinary afternoon became a migration

    Even the smallest moments changed shape

    A glance became an omen

    A silence became a continent

    The tears landed everywhere

    And afterward nothing remained innocent

    That is what grief does

    The Plumage of Joy

    It stains

    It places its thumbprint upon every remembered thing until the past begins glowing from within

    And I am tired

    Not from loving

    From carrying an entire sky

    From waking each morning with the feeling that something inside me has been left uncovered

    I am the bird

    Not because I am fragile

    Because birds protect the breastbone

    The soft place

    The living place

    The place closest to the heart

    Yet somehow I lifted my wings and showed it anyway

    And now the ribs remain open

    The rain enters

    The moon enters

    The silence enters

    Everything enters

    I am not the same woman

    I can feel her leaving

    The woman who mistook safety for permanence

    The woman who believed the sky lived above her instead of inside her

    I watch her recede

    The way a shoreline recedes from a departing ship

    Beautiful

    Familiar

    Unreachable

    And here I remain

    Simply unable to return to the creature I was before the tears taught every memory how to bleed light

    The Plumage of Joy

  • Still.

    I think God grew tired of churches long before we did

    Tired of men translating eternity
    through microphones

    Tired of watching humanity kneel
    before buildings
    while ignoring the trembling holiness
    inside one another

    My mother searched for Him everywhere

    In Pentecostal heat

    In Catholic incense

    In prophecy

    In oil pressed against foreheads

    In men who claimed certainty
    with frightening ease

    She carried God from denomination to denomination
    like a woman carrying a dying bird between her hands
    afraid that if she loosened her grip even slightly
    faith itself would escape

    And I

    I was baptized five times before adulthood

    Five separate offerings to the water

    Five attempts at becoming clean enough
    for heaven to stop looking through me

    Water over my hair

    Water over my eyes

    Water entering my mouth
    while strangers said
    be born again

    But even then
    I remember surfacing each time
    feeling exactly the same

    Only colder

    Surely—I thought
    God must grow weary of our desperation

    Surely even He must ache
    watching us wander endlessly
    through sanctuaries
    while He waits patiently for us
    inside ordinary suffering

    Because He was never only there

    He was in my mother’s hands
    smelling of detergent

    In the quiet after arguments

    In women removing their earrings at midnight
    too tired to continue pretending strength

    He was there
    the night I cried so hard
    my body shook against itself
    and no miracle arrived except morning

    Except breath

    Except survival

    I think that was God too

    Not rescue

    Not spectacle

    Just the unbearable mercy
    of remaining alive

    And sometimes at night
    when the world finally stops speaking
    I close my eyes
    and feel this immense heat
    hovering softly against my eyelids

    Not fire

    Not punishment

    A tenderness so luminous
    it frightens me

    I never open my eyes when it happens

    I cannot

    The warmth feels too familiar

    Like being held
    by a presence that witnessed every fracture of my life

    and still

    did not abandon me

    Not when grief hollowed me into silence

    Not when fear turned my body
    into a house of locked doors

    Not when I mistook survival for failure

    Not when I lay awake at impossible hours
    begging my own mind to spare me

    It saw me then too

    The woman crying quietly in parked cars
    so no one inside the house would hear

    Every version

    Every unraveling

    Every private devastation
    carried so quietly
    the world mistook my endurance for strength

    Seen

    Entirely seen

    And somehow

    Still loved

    Not repaired

    Not rescued

    Loved

    That is the part that undoes me

    Not heaven

    Not scripture

    Not the promise of eternity

    Only this unbearable possibility

    That something vast and merciful
    stood beside me through every sorrow I survived
    without once turning away

    And joy that pure

    Cannot belong to coincidence

    No

    That is faith

    Palpable faith

    Faith with a pulse

    Faith that enters the body quietly
    until loneliness itself begins glowing from within

    Now when I think of God
    I do not imagine judgment

    I imagine exhaustion

    Divine exhaustion

    The sorrow of loving humanity endlessly
    while watching us search everywhere for Him
    except the places He keeps appearing

    The hospital room

    The empty kitchen

    The trembling body

    The grieving mother

    The lonely woman standing barefoot at dawn
    trying one more time
    to survive her own life

    And still

    Still

    He comes

    Without thunder

    Only light

    Only breath

    Only the strange and merciful feeling
    that something invisible
    has loved us all along

    ‘Loneliness glowing from within’

  • Coordinates

    You ask me where I am
    so often now

    That sometimes
    I feel less like a woman
    and more like a delicate thing
    you are trying to keep hidden from the world

    Tucked away somewhere safe

    Somewhere unseen

    Home
    In bed
    Under blankets
    Inside the quiet corners of a life
    you can still imagine reaching

    And every time I say
    I just got home

    there is relief in you

    Good
    Stay home and relax

    As though the world itself
    becomes less threatening
    once I am behind a locked door

    But what amuses me
    is that you ask these questions
    as though I do not have a life
    moving constantly beyond your line of sight

    I work
    I drive
    I disappear into errands
    traffic
    noise
    whole afternoons that belong only to me

    And still
    you keep searching for me

    Did you eat
    What did you eat
    Did your trainer come today
    Did you train
    Did you go to the gym anyway
    Are you working tomorrow
    What are you doing now

    And I laugh sometimes
    because surely
    this cannot possibly be normal
    for two adults our age

    At this point
    my whereabouts are documented
    with the precision
    of a classified investigation

    And the absurd thing is

    you ask everything
    with such unbearable tenderness
    that I cannot even become annoyed properly

    Because beneath the questions
    there is no control

    Only care

    Care disguised as curiosity
    Concern disguised as conversation
    Longing disguised as routine

    You do not ask
    because you need information

    You ask because somewhere along the way
    my ordinary existence
    started mattering to you

    And perhaps that is why
    you become restless
    when I disappear too long

    Why relief enters your voice
    when I answer

    Why you always sound calmer
    once you know
    I am somewhere soft and reachable

    Meanwhile
    I stand in the middle of my very busy life
    holding my ringing phone
    wondering how something so tender

    can also be
    so exhausting

  • Ambiguity

    Ambiguity is unnatural to the earth

    The earth chooses

    Rivers carve
    Lightning strikes
    Winter strips every tree bare
    without apologizing for what it intends to take

    Even dusk
    does not linger forever
    between becoming and disappearance

    It surrenders fully
    to night

    Only human beings
    know how to remain in uncertainty

    Only we can stand trembling
    inside the doorway of love
    for months
    sometimes years
    unable to enter
    unable to leave
    asking another heartbeat
    to survive on implication alone

    The sea would never do this

    The sea crashes honestly

    It throws its entire body
    against the shore
    again
    and again
    until even stone understands
    what is being said

    But ambiguity—

    Ambiguity is a season
    that does not know whether it is mourning
    or blooming

    It is rain suspended inside clouds
    so long
    the sky begins to ache from carrying it

    And perhaps that is why it exhausts the soul

    Because the body was not designed
    to live forever
    inside — almost

    Not almost touched
    Not almost chosen
    Not almost loved

    There is a particular grief
    in being cherished softly
    by someone
    who cannot bear
    to say your name
    like a certainty

    A terrible loneliness
    in being held
    while simultaneously
    kept at a distance

    Like standing ankle deep in the tide
    for so many seasons
    the salt begins entering the bloodstream

    And still

    Some cruel instinct of the heart
    continues listening for thunder
    believing silence
    is merely the sky
    thinking

    Until one day
    you look toward the horizon
    and realize:

    The storm was never coming

    The storm
    was the waiting itself

  • Redolence

    When I see birds
    I can almost smell them

    An odd thing to confess aloud

    They smell like a wound drizzled by morning rain
    like dust lifting softly from pavement after weather
    like roses still carrying the cold breath of dawn

    Not unpleasant

    Just painfully alive

    Ancient somehow

    As though feathers preserve memories
    the body spends years trying to outlive

    Strange how scent reaches the soul before thought does

    One breath
    and suddenly the past becomes physical again

    The ache gathering beneath the ribs
    the overwhelming feeling
    of having lost something beautiful long ago

    That invisible meeting place between longing and recognition

    The way certain scents return us
    not only to people
    but to former versions of ourselves

    Softer selves
    unguarded ones
    the selves that still believed tenderness
    could exist without disappearance attached to it

    And perhaps that is why birds unsettle me

    Because when they cross the evening sky
    carrying the fragrance of rain and distance and earth
    something inside me rises toward them instinctively

    Not joy exactly
    not sorrow either

    But the unbearable remembrance
    of who I was
    before longing became part of my nature

  • Captivity

    I am not obsessed with birds

    It is worse than that

    I watch them because somewhere
    inside their suspended bodies
    I keep seeing myself

    And perhaps
    that is why I keep watching them

    Not to study them

    To capture them in stillness long enough
    to understand
    what in me
    continues surviving this way

    Because what devastates me most
    is how beautiful their endangerment is

    How every living thing
    appears most holy
    at the exact moment
    it could disappear

    There are birds
    who damage themselves quietly

    Not from storms

    From devotion

    In captivity some begin feather-plucking

    Small repeated griefs
    where the body
    unable to escape its own longing
    turns inward against itself

    The beak returns
    again and again
    to the same tender place

    Chest
    Wing
    Breastbone

    Until the aviary floor
    becomes covered
    in the evidence of attachment

    I understand that now

    How the soul
    when unable to fly freely
    toward what it loves
    sometimes begins consuming itself instead

    And still
    the bird continues singing

    That is the part
    that ruins me

    Not the wound

    The devotion surviving beneath it

    The instinct to keep returning
    to the very place
    where the heart exhausts itself

    Because birds are creatures of imprinting

    Once attachment enters the nervous system
    the body remembers

    Migration paths
    Familiar calls at dusk
    The exact direction
    of returning

    And what is longing
    if not the body
    trying to migrate back
    to the place
    it believes warmth once lived?

    Meanwhile
    my dignity survives quietly
    inside the attachment

    like a woman standing perfectly still
    inside rising water
    hoping no one notices
    how hard she is fighting
    to keep breathing

    Still graceful
    Still composed
    Still answering softly
    while entire oceans
    move beneath the skin

    Some evenings
    I watch the birds crossing
    the darkening sky
    and feel something inside me
    recognize itself in them completely

    Not freedom

    But suspension

    The beauty of remaining airborne while exhaustion slowly enters the wings

    And perhaps
    that is what devotion truly is

    Not love at its beginning

    But love after it realizes
    the light may never stay
    and continues flying toward it anyway

  • Dignity lives here

    My dignity lives here

    In the first image
    where everything is still charcoal and restraint

    Where the bird is almost disappearing
    into all that white silence
    pulling something dark and endless
    from the center of itself
    as though love
    had entered the body quietly
    and forgotten how to leave

    That was the beginning

    The sacred stage of longing

    The stage where silence
    still felt noble

    Where I believed
    if I carried my ache beautifully enough
    it might become survivable

    So I answered softly
    Smiled softly
    Learned how to make a home
    out of fragments

    A lingering hand
    A familiar voice at dusk

    The unbearable tenderness
    of someone leaving slowly
    because part of them
    does not wish to go

    And I never asked
    the impossible question

    Stay . .

    Charcoal | Watercolor

    Then came the color

    The bruising

    Blue for all the sorrow
    I folded inward
    so no one would have to witness it

    Red for every part of me
    that continued loving
    even after understanding
    love alone
    cannot keep a person near

    And suddenly
    the longing was no longer contained

    Dignity fighting for oxygen
    Charcoal | Watercolor 

    It spread through everything

    Through the wings
    Through the throat
    Through the hollow cathedral
    of the chest
    where attachment had already begun
    lighting its candles

    That is what these images are, I think

    The progression
    of a soul trying to preserve its dignity
    while quietly drowning in devotion

    At first
    the suffering is elegant

    Almost holy

    But grief is alive

    And living things
    eventually bleed through

    Dignity fighting for oxygen
    Charcoal | Watercolor 

    So the bird darkens
    The colors deepen
    The silence grows teeth

    Until one day
    even dignity itself
    begins fighting for oxygen
    inside the attachment

    And still

    The bird continues singing

    That is the part
    that dismantles me

    Not that it is wounded

    But that it continues loving
    while wounded

    Continues turning its small trembling body
    toward warmth
    even after realizing
    the light is already leaving

    Some nights
    I want to tear myself free from it completely

    To become a bird myself

    To split open the evening
    with all the things
    human dignity will not let me say

    To fly blindly into the dark
    Rather than remain here
    composed
    while my soul floods quietly beneath me

    Because I cannot remember
    ever loving like this before

    Not with this much ache

    Not with this much silence

    Not with this terrible instinct
    to preserve grace
    while the heart is collapsing

    And perhaps
    that is the saddest thing
    about being human

    how we continue singing
    long after we understand
    no one is coming
    to save us
    from our own devotion

    Dignity fighting for oxygen
    charcoal | watercolor

  • Oxygen & Light

    I surrender to the sun
    while the birds sing recklessly
    through the trees
    like they are drunk on oxygen and light

    The swing moves softly beneath me
    The breeze slips across my legs
    the side of my face
    warm and cool at once
    touching me
    with both hands

    And suddenly
    the whole afternoon feels romantic

    the wind
    the creaking wood
    the gold light spilling through leaves
    like heaven forgetting to close a door

    For once
    I do not want anything more
    than this

  • Human Interior

    I sit motionless
    until the world stops feeling louder
    than my own breathing

    I loosen my hands
    from the steering wheel

    I remind myself
    that fear is not prophecy

    That the nervous system
    can turn uncertainty
    into catastrophe
    if given enough silence

    Outside
    someone returns a shopping cart
    Someone adjusts sunglasses
    beneath a blue sky
    Someone continues living
    without realizing
    another human being nearby
    is quietly trying
    to come back to themselves

    I watch ordinary life carefully
    when this happens

    The woman loading groceries
    The wind moving through trees
    The automatic doors opening and closing

    Small evidence
    that reality remains intact

    Sometimes I lower the windows
    just to feel air move

    Sometimes I put my hand against my chest
    as if calming an injured animal

    Sometimes I say my own name
    softly inside my head
    to remind myself
    I am still here

    And eventually
    the world returns gradually

    Not all at once

    First the parking lot
    Then the sunlight
    Then my body

    Then the understanding
    that I am not losing my mind

    Only carrying too much of it
    at the same time

    Sometimes the tears arrive so quietly
    I notice only the taste

    Salt gathering at the corner of my mouth
    like the body attempting
    to return itself to the sea

    The instinct to disappear
    To heal unseen

    I think I am like cats in that way

    I hide to cure myself

    Inside parked vehicles
    Empty driveways
    Silent kitchens after midnight

    Anywhere the world cannot watch me
    trying to gather myself back together

    Sometimes I taste my own tears
    and think how strange it is
    that grief is made of salt too

    as though the body already understands
    that survival occasionally requires
    licking your own wounds
    in solitude

    Until eventually
    the breathing slows

    The thoughts loosen

    The ordinary world resumes its shape

    And I return quietly to it
    carrying myself carefully
    like something once injured

    still learning
    that not every silence
    means danger

  • Curvature

    At night
    my body becomes aware of you
    the way the sea
    becomes aware of the moon

    Slowly

    Then all at once

    The windows are open
    Rain moves somewhere beyond the trees
    The room smells faintly of oil
    warm cotton
    jasmine dying softly in a glass

    And my skin

    My skin remembers your hands
    with a devotion
    that frightens me

    The way you touched my waist
    as though holding something
    both sacred
    and dangerous

    The restraint of you

    Not taking
    Not claiming

    Only resting your hand there briefly
    while my entire body
    opened beneath the silence of it

    A woman can survive many things

    Loneliness
    Distance
    Even absence

    But gentleness
    gentleness enters the body
    and rearranges it

  • The Leaving

    Cuba is like love

    Beautiful enough
    to ruin people

    An island of salt and longing
    where everything beautiful
    learns to survive
    beside absence

    You carry it long after leaving

    Cuba is like love
    because it survives on contradiction

    You stand before the sea
    thinking something so beautiful
    should have saved everyone

    And yet beauty has never been protection

    Still
    people return to it in their minds forever

    Like first loves
    Like impossible loves
    Like homes that continue living inside the body
    long after the body has gone elsewhere

  • Living in Exile

    America must understand this:

    No one leaves home
    because they are bored

    No one places oceans
    between themselves
    and the people they love
    for curiosity

    Human beings are not trees
    We do not rip our own roots from the earth
    unless the ground beneath us
    has stopped allowing us to live

    My parents were not chasing luxury

    They were chasing breath
    Possibility
    A future large enough
    for their children to stand upright inside

    And what courage it must require
    to leave behind everyone you love
    while pretending to your children
    that you are not terrified

    To smile on the journey
    To call sacrifice an opportunity
    To hide grief inside hard work

    America sees immigrants arrive

    But it rarely sees
    what they carried here invisibly:

    The funerals they missed
    The mothers they could not hold again
    The fathers who grew old
    in photographs

    There are people in this country
    who have spent decades
    loving their homeland from afar
    like one mourns someone still alive
    but impossibly unreachable

    That is exile

    Not politics
    Not headlines

    Exile is waking up some mornings
    unable to explain
    why your heart aches
    for a street that no longer exists
    the way you remember it

    And still
    They build
    They work
    They love this country too

    Because gratitude and grief
    can live inside the same body

    Because human beings
    are capable of carrying
    two homes at once

    The one that made them
    and the one that finally allowed them
    to dream without fear

  • Freedom’s Address

    My childhood home stood two blocks from the sea

    Not metaphorically

    Truly

    Two blocks of crumbling pavement
    past the embassies with their iron gates
    and foreign flags lifting beautifully
    in the Caribbean wind
    like freedom had an address
    and we did not

    I remember the terrible contrast of it

    chauffeurs polishing black cars
    while old women downstairs
    watered thin soup to feed five mouths

    Diplomats drinking imported whiskey
    behind guarded glass
    while boys in torn sandals
    kicked flat soccer balls through alleyways
    smelling of salt
    kerosene
    and exhaustion

    And yet the ocean belonged to everyone

    That was the unbearable beauty of Cuba

    The poor could stand at the Malecón at dusk
    beside men who had never missed a meal
    and both would fall silent
    before the same enormous water

    Because the sea did not care
    who was oppressed
    and who carried a passport out

    It touched every stone equally

    At night
    the waves struck the seawall so hard
    the spray reached the streets
    cool against our faces
    like the island itself
    refusing to die quietly

    I grew up understanding freedom
    not as politics

    but as distance

    As horizon

    As the ache of watching ships
    become smaller and smaller
    until they dissolved completely
    into another life

    Some nights
    the grownups lowered their voices
    when certain subjects entered the room

    But the ocean
    the ocean never whispered

    It roared openly beside us

    Restless
    Uncontained

    I think that is why Cubans carry sadness
    so elegantly

    We were raised beside something infinite
    while living inside limitation

    Raised hearing waves
    crash against stone
    over
    and over
    and over again

    as if the earth itself
    believed no wall
    should remain standing forever

    Even now
    far from that coastline
    I still need water near me

    Not for leisure
    Not for beauty

    For memory

    Because somewhere inside me
    there is still a little girl
    walking toward the sea at twilight
    past embassies glowing gold
    past tired buildings collapsing inward
    past the unbearable divide
    between the free and the trapped

    believing
    with her entire heart
    that the horizon meant
    there had to be more than this

  • Roofline: Weatherproof

    I think something inside me
    permanently altered
    the day I left the hospital
    with my oldest son in my arms
    and nowhere to go afterward

    My stomach stitched in perfect lines
    The nurses speaking softly around me
    as if tenderness alone
    could disguise abandonment

    Outside
    families loaded cars carefully

    Fathers adjusting blankets
    Women leaning back into passenger seats
    flowers resting in their laps
    like proof
    they had been carried gently
    through the violence of becoming

    ‘Rooftops’ | Charcoal | Graphite

    And there I stood
    holding my newborn
    trying not to let humiliation
    be the first thing he inherited from me

    So I called a taxi

    I remember the driver asking for the address
    and the terrible realization washing over me

    I did not even have a key
    to enter my own home

    God . .

    Even now
    all these years later
    I can still feel
    the animal panic of it

    Not woman
    Not wife
    Not mother

    Animal

    A creature trying to shelter her newborn
    from storm weather
    with nothing but her own exhausted body

    The taxi dropped us off quietly
    and I remember standing there
    holding my son against my chest
    the evening air cooling the sweat on my skin
    realizing I had nowhere to go

    So my neighbor let us inside

    And something about that moment
    scarred me more deeply
    than childbirth ever could

    Because the physical pain was irrelevant

    None of it compared
    to the humiliation
    of standing outside your own door
    with a newborn in your arms
    feeling less like a human being
    and more like some stray cat
    searching desperately for shelter
    before nightfall

    And the terrible part is
    almost no one knew

    Not my family
    Not friends
    Not even my son

    Especially not my son

    Because I refused
    to poison his love for his father
    with the truth of what happened

    So I swallowed it

    Quietly
    Daily
    For years

    And perhaps that is where
    the real scar formed

    not in flesh
    but in silence

    The performance

    God . .
    how wickedly I fought
    to preserve appearances after that

    I became composed
    Functional
    Capable

    I built warmth around my children
    while privately feeling
    like some weather-beaten creature
    dragging itself through winter
    on instinct alone

    People praised my strength

    They had no idea
    strength sometimes looked like
    crying silently in bathrooms
    washing your face
    then walking back in
    because small eyes were watching
    and you refused
    to let them witness the storm

    ‘Rooftops’ | Charcoal | Graphite

    And maybe that is why
    I dream of rooftops

    Because roofs understand
    what it means
    to endure weather publicly
    while splitting apart slowly underneath

    Rain
    Heat
    Storms
    Lightning

    Still
    from the street
    they appear intact

    Just like I did

    But some nights
    when the world quiets enough
    I can still see her

    that younger version of myself
    stitched closed too quickly
    holding a sleeping newborn
    outside a locked door
    already understanding
    that survival
    was no longer temporary

    It was about to become
    her native language

  • Roofline

    Some nights
    I want to live on the roof

    Not visit it
    Not escape to it briefly

    Live there

    Make a small religion
    out of shingles and weather

    Drag blankets across the incline
    let the night air raise goosebumps along my arms
    learn the language of wind
    instead of human disappointment

    Because roofs understand things
    houses do not

    A house remembers too much

    The rooms hold emotional fingerprints
    The walls repeat old conversations quietly at night
    Even silence feels furnished

    But a roof
    a roof faces the sky directly

    It knows rain intimately
    Knows the ache of August heat
    Knows hail
    lightning
    the slow ruin of seasons
    and still remains open to the atmosphere

    I think I belong
    to that kind of existence now

    Open-air
    Half-feral
    Emotionally exposed to weather

    I imagine myself there at midnight
    flat on my back
    watching clouds drag themselves
    across the moon
    like exhausted thoughts refusing sleep

    The cold fronts arriving first as whispers
    The smell of rain climbing upward from the earth
    Tree branches below me
    thrashing softly in the dark
    like grief trying to become visible

    And for once
    nothing asking anything of me

    No performance
    No explanations
    No pretending the body
    is not carrying entire oceans of feeling
    through ordinary life

    Just me
    and the terrible beautiful atmosphere
    of being alive

    Maybe spring would soften me there

    Maybe summer storms
    would teach me how to come apart correctly

    Maybe winter
    with its clean unbearable cold
    would finally quiet
    the constant machinery of longing
    inside my chest

    And maybe that is why
    I ache for height

    because sadness feels different
    closer to the sky

    Less like drowning
    More like weather

    Passing through
    Electric
    Uncontrollable
    Briefly luminous

    Some nights
    I swear I could sleep there forever
    letting moonlight collect along my skin
    letting rain baptize every memory out of me
    until I became less woman
    and more horizon

    something no longer trapped inside walls
    but stretched endlessly open
    beneath the enormous dark mercy
    of night

  • Return Address

    I sit here digitally composing words across a screen
    while somewhere far away
    my son’s handwriting still exists on paper

    creased softly at the folds
    forty-five days old already
    by the time it reached my hands

    And nothing about modern life can compete with that

    Not the blue glow of notifications
    Not the speed of a text arriving mid-thought
    Not the endless stream of people speaking
    without ever truly touching one another

    Because ink carries the body with it

    The pressure of his hand
    The pause between sentences
    The places where he pressed harder
    without realizing emotion had entered the page

    I opened the envelope slowly
    like people used to open news from war
    carefully—reverently
    already afraid of loving it too much

    And somehow this letter lifted my spirit
    in ways nothing else has been able to lately

    For one suspended second
    I forgot distance
    Forgot oceans
    Forgot time zones and deployments
    and the unbearable mathematics of missing someone

    I forgot the years moving forward

    I was no longer standing in my kitchen
    holding paper beneath morning light

    I was simply his mother again
    close enough to hear his voice in the next room
    close enough to believe
    love still travels faster than grief

    And I wanted to archive this feeling somehow

    Fold it carefully into a drawer
    Place it beside kindergarten photographs
    old report cards
    little league schedules
    the backpacks I could never throw away

    As if tenderness could be preserved
    like pressed flowers between heavy pages

    As if a mother could save a moment
    before life carried it off again

    Because the terrible thing about joy
    is how quickly it understands
    it cannot stay

    So I stood there quietly
    holding the letter against my chest
    like something alive

    trying to memorize
    the exact shape of being needed
    the exact sound of my spirit returning to me
    through his handwriting

    And for a moment
    this loud technological world disappeared

    No algorithms
    No scrolling
    No noise

    Only a mother standing silently
    holding proof
    that space and time are not always strong enough
    to keep the heart from returning home

  • 45 Days

    My youngest wrote me a letter

    Forty-five days ago
    and I cannot stop thinking about the fact
    that his love had already been traveling toward me
    while I was still living ordinary life unaware of it

    Forty-five days

    Forty-five mornings I woke up not knowing
    a piece of him already existed in the world
    trying to find its way back to me

    Do you understand how devastating that is?

    That while I was awake or asleep
    his handwriting was somewhere moving through darkness

    sealed inside trucks
    resting in forgotten bins
    crossing highways at night

    all because my son sat down one day
    and missed me enough
    to let his hand speak

    And suddenly modern life feels so empty to me

    These instant little messages we fire at each other all day
    without breath in them
    without weight
    without silence

    But a letter

    a letter suffers distance

    It earns arrival

    For forty-five days
    the page carried his touch without mine

    The same hand I once held crossing parking lots
    The same hand that learned how to write its own name
    while I stood nearby believing time moved slowly

    God
    I did not just read his words

    I felt time itself collapse

    And there he was again somehow
    inside the pressure of certain letters

    Forty-five days old already

    By the time I touched the page
    he had already changed a little

    Laughed at things I did not hear
    Walked through evenings I did not see
    Carried worries silently without me beside him

    That is motherhood perhaps . .

    the lifelong ache
    of realizing your children continue becoming people
    in rooms you cannot enter

    Still

    when I saw the word “Mom” written there
    in the same familiar slant he has carried since boyhood

    something inside me broke open so quietly
    I almost mistook it for peace

    Because after all the years
    all the growing
    all the distance
    all the necessary separations life demands from us

    some part of him
    still writes home
    like I am the safest thing he has ever known

  • Temporary Weather

    I have loved men
    the way rain loves old cities

    ‘temporary weather’ – charcoal

    completely
    recklessly
    without asking permission
    to flood every quiet street inside them

    And in return
    I became fluent in absence

    I learned how to survive on fragments

    There were years
    I mistook longing for purpose

    Love should not leave a woman
    feeling invisible
    inside her own life

    And sometimes I wonder

    was it my exterior
    that kept them from seeing me clearly?

    The woman they desired
    was never the whole woman

    Perhaps beauty has its own loneliness
    Its own terrible distance

    They saw the face
    the body
    the perfume entering a room before I did

    but not the trembling tenderness beneath it all

    Not the woman
    trying to survive another ordinary heartbreak gracefully

    Not the exhaustion
    Not the depth
    Not the terrifying sincerity
    with which I loved

    Maybe some men only know
    how to approach a woman’s surface

    And maybe I became so luminous outwardly
    that my soul stood quietly behind the light
    waiting to be noticed

    Now the house is quieter

    My sons are grown
    Their laughter lives mostly in photographs now
    in closets filled with the soft archaeology of motherhood

    And I

    I no longer panic at distance

    I no longer chase what retreats

    I have learned
    that some people only know how to love in glimpses
    beautifully
    sincerely even
    but briefly

    like lightning illuminating an entire ocean

    I do not hate them for it anymore

    ‘temporary weather’ – charcoal

    But I no longer build homes
    inside temporary weather

    These days
    I sit beside myself more gently

    I let the dishes wait
    I let evening settle slowly onto the furniture

    And sometimes
    late at night
    in the black reflection of the kitchen window

    I catch sight of the woman I became

    still soft
    still carrying oceans
    still dangerous with love

    but no longer standing at the harbor
    begging ships to choose her shore

    There is a difference now
    between loneliness
    and peace

    I finally learned it
    in the quiet after everyone left

    And God . .

    what a beautiful thing it is
    to become your own safe place
    after spending a lifetime
    asking the world to let you in

  • Archived Love

    I still have the backpacks

    Every one of them

    Kindergarten dinosaurs
    faded superheroes
    broken zippers
    ink stains
    the straps worn thin
    from years of carrying
    small important things

    They sit inside plastic totes now
    stacked quietly in the house
    like sealed chapters
    of a life that happened too fast

    Sometimes I open them

    And suddenly
    the years come rushing back

    little lunch boxes
    crumbs at the bottom
    folded spelling tests
    a forgotten pencil
    the smell of childhood
    still hiding faintly in the fabric
    like time never fully left

    People say:
    why keep all of that?

    But mothers understand

    Because those backpacks
    once moved through this house
    attached to small boys
    with untied shoes
    sticky hands
    and entire universes
    still tucked inside their laughter

    I carried them through
    field trips
    divorce
    growing pains
    late-night homework
    broken hearts
    and all the ordinary holy moments
    that disappear before you realize
    they are becoming memory

    Now the house is quieter

    The backpacks do not move anymore
    But when I see them
    I remember this truth

    for a little while
    I was the center
    of somebody’s whole world

    And maybe that is why
    I cannot throw them away

    Because inside those faded bags
    lives proof
    that love once ran wildly
    through these rooms
    calling me Mom

  • Graphited Harbor

    There are men
    who will never say

    I miss you

    Instead they ask

    Are you home?
    Did you eat?

    As if longing sounds less dangerous
    when folded into ordinary language

    And maybe for some people
    it does

    Maybe some hearts
    were taught survival before confession

    I used to think harbors
    were built for ship for battered things
    dragging entire storms behind them
    for vessels returning at impossible hours
    and their lights barely surviving the fog

    But now I think
    a harbor is simply
    what happens
    when something weary
    finally finds the one place it can soften

    Maybe that is why
    you keep asking

    Where I am

    Not because you need directions

    But because somewhere inside you
    my existence has become a shoreline

    something your spirit checks for
    before resting

    So now when I think of harbors
    I no longer imagine docks or boats

    I imagine two people
    finding shelter
    inside the sound
    of each other’s voice

    Charcoal Dust
    Dusted Graphite

    Sleeplessness | unfinished feeling

  • Preface of a Harbor

    A woman facing water

    Preface of a Harbor | Charcoal

    Has existed in art longer than memory itself
    waiting
    grieving
    remembering
    becoming

    The harbor is not merely a place in these sketches
    It is the human condition
    the shoreline between staying and leaving

    Smudging of a Harbor | Graphite

    I drew the figure again and again in charcoal
    because charcoal behaves like memory
    it smudges
    disappears
    darkens where touched too often

    And the lighthouse became abstract on purpose

    Some people are not meant to be rendered clearly
    Some loves survive only in silhouette

    “Harbor | Charcoal

    So I kept stripping the image down
    less harbor
    less certainty
    more white space
    more silence
    until all that remained
    was a woman
    an ocean
    and the unbearable softness
    of standing still
    while something inside her
    kept drifting toward shore

  • Harbor

    Harbor | Charcoal

    Watched a man bluefish near shore
    and called him my friend

    Not because I knew him deeply
    but because loneliness sends strange signals across water
    and sometimes another lonely thing answers

    He drifted there beyond the tide line
    half man—half sea
    moving through the dark current
    like a ship that had spent too many years
    navigating storms alone

    And I thought about love then

    How women often stand at the shoreline
    wanting arrival

    Wanting something that docks fully
    Something that lowers its anchor honestly
    Something that says
    here I am
    I am no longer drifting

    But some men love like the sea itself

    Harbor | Charcoal | Watercolor

    They come close in waves
    Retreat quietly
    Return again under different weather

    Not because they feel nothing

    Because they feel too much
    and fear what happens
    when a heart finally reaches harbor

    So they remain partly offshore
    close enough to see the lanterns burning
    close enough to hear tenderness calling from land
    yet unwilling to surrender
    their last route of escape

    And women

    women become lighthouse keepers in these loves

    Faithful
    Exhausted
    Standing in terrible weather
    trying to interpret distant signals correctly

    Was that warmth?
    Was that love?
    Was that merely loneliness
    passing briefly through the harbor again?

    The fish-tail made sense to me then

    Because some people belong partly to deep water

    Partly to solitude
    Partly to longing

    They want intimacy
    the way sailors want shore after months at sea

    desperately
    romantically
    and with absolutely no idea
    how to live there peacefully once they arrive

    Still, there was gentleness in him

    The tide carried him softly as though even the ocean understood
    how exhausting it is
    to spend a lifetime torn
    between closeness and freedom

    To be continued

  • Wooden Box

    If I could
    I would place every fear I have for my sons
    inside a small wooden box
    and leave it out in the yard

    I think about that box often

    I imagine it sitting there alone beneath the weather
    the grass growing slowly around it
    rainwater darkening the wood
    August heat opening tiny cracks along the lid

    A plain little box
    holding all the unbearable parts of motherhood

    At first
    the box would have held small things

    Fevers in the middle of the night
    Tiny shoes by the door
    The sound of them crying from another room
    The terrible helplessness of hearing your child cough
    while the whole dark house waits with you

    Back then
    I thought motherhood was about protecting

    I did not yet understand
    that motherhood is mostly about enduring

    ‘Motherhood’

    So the years passed
    and the box grew heavier

    Into it went first heartbreaks
    Late-night drives
    Silences
    The fear that arrives when your children begin
    walking further and further away from your arms

    And now my sons are men

    Men in uniform
    Men standing inside realities
    I cannot soften for them

    ‘Motherhood’

    So now the box holds oceans

    It holds unanswered messages
    It holds the terrible imagination of mothers
    It holds the sound of a phone not ringing
    It holds every silent prayer
    I have whispered into the light

    If I could
    I would leave the box outside forever

    ‘Motherhood’

    I would let rain kneel over it through the night
    Let thunder shake it open
    Let wind carry pieces of my fear away
    through the trees

    I would let winter freeze it stiff
    Let summer split the wood apart slowly
    until the earth itself
    began carrying some of the weight for me

    Because I am tired
    of carrying the box inside my body

    Tired of setting it beside my coffee each morning
    Tired of carrying it room to room invisibly
    while the world continues normally around me

    And still
    when I close my eyes
    the box becomes lighter again

    Inside it

    I find warm little hands clenched in mine
    Their laughter moving through the hallway

    Maybe that is the true shape of motherhood

    a small wooden box
    filled first with tenderness
    then with fear
    then with all the love in the world
    a human being can no longer survive carrying alone

  • Cageless

    I no longer dream
    of extraordinary things

    Not anymore

    Becoming . .
    “Bruised Peaches & Old Paintings”

    I dream of a quiet kitchen at dawn

    I dream of open windows
    A slow walk at dusk
    beneath a sky turning the color
    of bruised peaches and old paintings

    Watercolor | Charcoal

    I want less noise now
    Less performance
    Less of this endless human habit
    of proving we are worthy of being loved

    What I want now is simple
    and therefore sacred

    A sink full of dishes after dinner

    The soft weight of my sleeping cats in sunlight

    Music drifting through the house at midnight

    And love
    if it finds me again
    must arrive gently

    No grasping hands
    No crowded silences
    No love that mistakes possession for intimacy

    I want someone calm enough
    to sit beside my quiet
    without trying to translate it

    Someone who understands
    that my space

    my art, my time
    the invisible interior life of me, has always been cageless

    Not distant
    Not cold

    Simply alive in quiet ways

    Like birds disappearing into evening trees

    Like moonlight moving freely across the floor

    Like poems arriving at 2 a.m.
    asking for nothing except room to breathe

    Because after all these years
    I think love should feel less like fire
    and more like light from another room

    soft, steady, enduring

    the kind that lets you remain fully yourself
    while never letting you forget
    you are deeply—gently
    not alone

  • Mornings to me

    Morning to me arrives like a man who forgot his hat and came back quietly for it

    Soft-footed—half-awake across the kitchen floor
    like God still believes in us a little

    My coffee breathes first

    Outside sprinklers turn slowly through somebody else’s green lawn

    And somewhere a woman opens a window
    without knowing she just saved herself for another day

    I love mornings

    And their refusal to explain anything

    I stand here barefoot
    hair uncombed holding this warm cup against my chest

    And for one holy second
    I can hear my own soul breathing inside this quiet house

    That’s morning

    Not sunrise
    Not birdsong
    Not poetry

    Just the beautiful human ache
    of beginning again

  • Ambergris

    Too late to ruin a life completely.

    Ambergris

    And maybe that is why the body refuses to forget it.

    Not the person exactly.

    The atmosphere of them. The warmth left behind in certain rooms. The way silence changed when they entered it. The unbearable intimacy of standing too close while pretending not to notice.

    And even now, years or hours or lifetimes later something remains.

    Like the ghost of ambergris
    still clinging faintly to a collar or the wrist of someone passing too near—warm and mineral and devastatingly human.

    The kind of scent that makes the body remember before the mind has time to defend itself.

    Ambergris

    Too late to ruin a life completely.

    Yet somehow still capable of altering the pulse.

    Because some connections never become ordinary enough to lose their sensuality.

    They remain suspended
    living softly beneath the skin—where longing becomes indistinguishable from memory.

    And perhaps that is why these loves endure.

    Not because they lasted.

    Because they never fully touched the ground.

    Like desire itself
    trying very hard
    to remain civilized.

    Ambergris

  • lives inside rain

    There is something about rain in the late afternoon that makes the heart unable to hide from itself.

    Maybe it is the softened light.
    The sound of water moving through trees and gutters.

    But the moment the rain begins, everything returns.

    The people we loved.
    The people we lost.
    The lives we almost had.
    The tenderness we still carry despite ourselves.

    And suddenly I feel everything.

    Every person I have ever loved.
    Every version of myself that survived loneliness quietly.
    Every moment tenderness entered my life and left before I was ready.

    For one impossible moment they all come back.

    My sons as babies asleep against my chest, warm and safe.
    The sound of laughter moving through a house that once belonged to all of us.

    And then the breaking of it.

    The slow unbearable fracture of a little family I tried so hard to hold together with my bare hands.

    A marriage that looked like a home from the outside but inside felt like disappearing quietly day after day.
    The exhaustion of surviving inside something that no longer allowed me to fully exist as myself.
    The terrible guilt of walking away.
    The terrible necessity of it too.

    And sometimes, when it rains like this, I still wonder.

    Should I have stayed?
    Should I have endured a little longer for the sake of my sons, the photographs, the illusion of wholeness?

    But deep down I know remaining would have been its own kind of violence.

    A slow crime against the self.

    And so I left carrying both grief and freedom in the same trembling hands.

    Rain brings all of it back.

    Quietly.

    The way grief actually lives inside the body.

    You stand there listening to water move through the darkening afternoon while your phone stays silent beside you and suddenly the weight of being human feels almost unbearable.

    Because love after fifty is no longer about fireworks.

    It is about tenderness.

    Someone remembering you.
    Someone noticing your exhaustion.
    Someone asking if you made it home safe in the rain.

    And the heartbreaking thing is how little of that most people receive.

    Most people are starving for softness while pretending they no longer need it.
    Most people are carrying invisible loneliness through conversations about ordinary things.

    And still

    The heart continues reaching.

    Even after loss.
    Even after disappointment.
    Even after entire lives collapse and rebuild themselves around absence.

    The heart remembers warmth and spends the rest of its life searching for it again.

    Outside the rain keeps falling steadily and inside every lit room
    someone is remembering somebody they loved.

    Someone gone.
    Someone distant.
    Someone they still carry quietly inside them.

    And maybe that is why rain hurts so much because for a little while
    everyone we have ever loved feels close enough to touch again.

  • Tired

    I am tired in the way a city is tired
    after sirens have dragged themselves through every artery of it

    I am tired in the shoulders of women who carry invisible ledgers—who balance grief with groceries

    I am tired of being the room that holds men who do not live in it

    I am tired of almost

    tired of being almost chosen
    almost held
    almost enough

    do you know what that does
    to a woman who has already given
    all the versions of herself
    she once promised she would protect

    it teaches her
    how to disappear
    politely

    I am tired of the strange holiness of contradiction
    how a man can bow his head to God
    and lift his hands to me
    without ever saying my name out loud

    I am tired of swallowing the moment

    I am so tired

    tired enough to finally admit
    that I have been generous
    where I should have been guarded

    open
    where I should have been still

    So — tonight

    I will take back my hands
    from where they reached too far

  • God is

    the smile in your children’s faces
    that breaks you open
    before you can protect yourself

    the way morning comes anyway
    pulling light across a room
    you didn’t think you could get up in

    the breath that stays
    even when you wish it would stop
    even when you are too tired to carry it

    the small hand that finds yours in the dark
    and believes without question—that you will be there the moment you realize
    you have to be

    the light on the wall
    that doesn’t explain anything
    and still feels like mercy

    the yes you didn’t plan to say
    the one that leaves you trembling
    the one that keeps you here

    the chair you leave empty
    and still return to
    as if something might come back

    the strength you never asked for
    but were given anyway

    the quiet that holds you
    when you are falling apart
    and no one knows

    the forgiveness
    that comes back
    after you swore you were done

    the love
    you keep giving
    even after it breaks you
    even after it leaves you

    again
    and again

    the nights
    you sit alone
    holding everything together

    and no one sees

    and still

    you hold

    the way you keep showing up
    even when it costs you everything

    the way you still care
    after learning how much it hurts

    the way you make space
    for others
    when no one made it for you

    the moment you whisper
    I can’t do this

    and do it anyway

    the life you are building
    even when it feels like nothing is forming

    the quiet strength
    of not leaving yourself

    when everything in you
    wants to disappear

    God is this

    this breaking

    this holding

    this staying, the part of you that will not give up even when you beg it to

    the hope that is not gentle or easy but relentless, the force that keeps your hands open and your heart turning

    the reason you are still here, still loving, still choosing, still… after everything, still

  • already yours

    there is a bird in the hinge

    you know it

    in the moment you almost choose yourself and don’t

    I kept mine quiet, called it strength

    it wasn’t —just

    fear, well-behaved

    it learned my breath, waited, pressed

    until I felt it

    so here—take him

    and know—color is effortless the moment you stop holding it back

  • The Hinge

    i saw myself
    standing in the grocery line of my own life

    hands full of things
    i did not choose

    no one tells you
    how quietly it happens

    how you keep saying yes
    until your hands forget
    what no —feels like

    i watched myself swallow it—a bird

    not the kind they print on curtains

    but the ragged one
    ink-splattered
    off balance

    with a wing
    that can’t decide
    if it is breaking
    or beginning

    i say bird
    you say anxiety
    the doctor says reflux
    my mother says pray

    my body says:
    listen

    behind the sternum
    that almost-ache
    that isn’t pain

    that drop in the gut, that sudden remembering
    you are alive

    and not
    where you thought
    you would be

    i have become
    a species of almost-flight

    i negotiate with gravity
    in quiet rooms
    and call it duty

    some call it love
    some call it
    be reasonable

    i have learned
    the choreography of staying

    how to smile
    while something in me
    paces

    i saw a woman
    that woman was me

    setting a table for ghosts

    one plate for my father

    one for each son
    in their uniform of distance

    their chairs pulled out
    but empty

    and one
    for the self
    that slips out the back door
    when no one is looking

    she pours water
    for all of them

    her hands don’t shake

    she does not drink

    the bird in her chest
    has feathers made of memory
    a beak made of unfinished sentences

    its claws
    hook into the soft places
    where decisions live

    and the world keeps saying
    be calm
    be grateful

    while the sky
    indecent in its openness
    says nothing

    i ask it for instructions

    it gives me none

    only this:

    witness

    the bird does not die
    when ignored

    it grows patient
    it grows precise
    it learns your habits

    it learns
    how long you can stand yourself

    and waits

    for the moment
    you mistake silence
    for peace

    and then

    it moves

    not loud
    not dramatic

    just enough
    to ruin the lie

    i am not telling you to leave

    i am telling you to notice
    the exact second
    your breath changes

    the pause
    before you explain it away

    the shift
    you pretend not to feel

    that . .

    that is the hinge

    that is where your life
    opens

    or stays closed

    you are not broken

    you are over-kept
    over-held
    over-explained

    you are wings
    taught to apologize for air

    so stand there

    in your kitchen
    in your car
    in the long corridor
    of your thoughts

    stand there
    and feel it

    the press
    the pulse
    the almost

    the part of you
    that still wants more
    even now

    call it bird
    if you want

    call it hunger

    call it the refusal
    to live
    half a life

  • you don’t know men

    you think I stay
    because I return to the same chair

    because my hands find you and you accept them without question

    you believe that is the whole of me

    You don’t know men (graphite)

    but you don’t know men

    you don’t know
    how a man can enter a room and nothing visible changes

    and yet something does
    a slight turning

    like a field responding to wind no one else feels

    I have watched it happen without meaning to notice

    there is something beautiful in them

    I have to say that

    the way they move with a kind of quiet certainty

    as if the ground has already agreed to hold them

    you would like that about him
    you already do

    you know the man who bends down to you

    who lets you lean into his hand

    who asks nothing more than the moment he is in

    you know only the man who pets you

    but you don’t know
    how those same hands can linger after they are gone

    for years he was simply someone I knew

    a presence that did not ask to be considered
    beyond what it was

    and then

    one day

    nothing happened

    and still
    something shifted

    I cannot show you where
    there is no place to point

    no beginning you could follow

    only a feeling

    like the first sign of weather before the sky changes

    you don’t know men
    how they can remain as they are

    and still become something else
    inside you

    now

    when he reaches
    I do not step away

    it is not that I don’t see it
    it is not that I don’t understand

    it is that something in me has already answered

    and afterward
    I carry it

    that is the part
    you would not understand

    how I return here

    sit beside you

    touch you as I always have

    and still feel
    what has passed through me

    not where it happened
    but where it stayed

    you understand the world as something that arrives and remains

    you understand what can be held

    but you don’t know
    how something can move through you

    and leave no place behind for itself

    and still be there

    you don’t know men

    how they can walk away
    with nothing in their hands

    and still leave something in yours

    and yet
    there is no anger in me

    only a quiet awareness

    that I am

    not as I was

    that something in me
    has opened

    and does not close as easily

    you look at me
    as though I am whole

    as though I belong entirely to what returns

    and I let you believe it

    because you do not know my language

    you do not know men

    and still

    I stay

    You don’t know men (graphite)

  • I stay

    you walk past me
    like you’re still carrying the outside in with you

    the door closes
    but it doesn’t take it with it

    keys fall
    bag falls
    your hands don’t

    they reach for paper
    like it won’t ask you anything back

    you don’t look at me
    not yet

    and I want to tell you

    it can wait

    you can sit first
    you can breathe

    but I don’t have that kind of voice

    so I stay quiet

    like always

    you work fast
    too fast

    like something is right behind you
    breathing
    calling your name
    in a voice you don’t answer

    I hear it

    I wish you could hear it
    the way I do

    but I can’t give it to you

    I can only watch
    as your hands press harder

    like pressure might fix it

    I have seen you in other lives

    same body
    different light

    this home has seen it too

    birthdays
    graduations
    deaths

    walls holding sound
    long after it leaves

    your sons became men

    one by one
    they walked out of these rooms

    carrying pieces of you with them

    the doors closed softer each time

    and the house learned
    how to be quiet

    you used to turn toward it

    now you turn inward

    and I

    I remember everything
    you don’t say out loud

    you move like a held breath

    like if you stop
    everything will rise at once

    I want to tell you
    it’s already there

    it’s not waiting

    but I am not made for words

    so I sit

    and breathe slow
    for both of us

    you go somewhere

    I know the place

    your body stays
    but you leave it

    your eyes change

    the room feels it

    I go with you

    I always go with you

    because I can

    because you don’t know how to stay there alone

    you give things up early

    like you’re afraid
    of what might stay

    I want to tell you

    not everything that stays
    hurts

    not everything that grows
    will take from you

    but I don’t have language

    only presence

    only this small body
    that follows you
    without question

    there are others

    I know them too

    the ones you don’t speak about but carry anyway

    I feel them
    in the way your breathing breaks
    in the way your hands hesitate
    over nothing

    I sit with you there

    I wish I could say
    their names with you

    I wish I could tell you
    they are still soft inside you

    but I can’t

    so I stay

    there are nights
    you are not here

    even when you are

    you sit in front of me
    but you are somewhere deeper

    and I want to call you back

    I want to say
    come here
    stay here
    with me

    but all I can do

    is walk closer

    sit beside you

    wait

    and then

    you come find me

    not because I called you

    but because something in you
    remembers

    my stillness
    my quiet
    my staying

    your hand reaches

    your body softens

    your breath returns

    and I feel it

    that moment
    when you come back into yourself

    I would tell you
    you don’t have to leave like that

    I would tell you
    you are safe here

    I would tell you
    you are still whole
    even when you feel like you are not

    but I was not made
    for your language

    so I stay

    where you can find me

    every time you forget
    where you are

    So I stay

  • Prelude to Rumor

    this, comes from something I’ve felt for a long time but didn’t know how to show

    the first time it happened I was twelve

    standing in front of a mirror, looking at myself too long—something shifted

    I could see my face, but I couldn’t feel that it was me, and that frightened me

    since then, I’ve learned to recognize the feeling

    it comes quietly

    I keep talking, moving doing what I’m doing but I’m not fully inside it

    this is what that feels like to me

    like something begins at one point

    here at the shoulder and then spreads outward

    not as damage

    not as pain

    but as a kind of release

    like I am still here but also moving beyond the shape that holds me

    the lines are that movement

    the color is everything that doesn’t stay contained

    the body is what remains when something in me has already stepped away

    I call it rumor in skin because it doesn’t arrive as something clear or visible

    it begins as a feeling barely there

    difficult to name

    something moving under the surface before it can be seen

    it spreads quietly

    without asking

    and by the time I recognize it

    it is already happening

    Rumor in Skin

  • Mid Flight

    I start with a line

    graphite—light
    almost unsure of itself

    because if I press too hard it becomes a commitment

    and I’ve spent years
    living inside commitments
    that didn’t fully belong to me

    I build it slowly

    short strokes
    adjustments
    erasures
    small negotiations with the page

    I try to find the shape
    something recognizable
    something that makes sense

    this is the part
    I was taught to trust

    the part that can be explained
    justified
    approved

    I hear his voice here

    clear
    decisive

    you can’t make a living with words
    you can’t make a life out of art

    so I learned

    to keep it contained

    to make it small enough
    to exist without threatening anything

    but it never stays

    somewhere in the middle

    my hand loosens

    not because I decide to

    because I can’t hold it anymore

    and that’s when I reach
    for water

    I let it fall

    not controlled
    not measured

    I let it touch the graphite
    and pull it outward

    and it spreads

    past the edges
    past the version
    that was acceptable

    past the place
    where I could still say

    this is just a drawing

    and I watch it

    because I know

    this part is not about skill

    this is release

    this is the place
    I was told
    not to trust

    words do the same thing

    they start contained
    careful
    edited
    safe

    and then

    they don’t

    they spill
    they move
    they say things
    I didn’t plan to admit

    and I come here

    again
    and again
    and again

    not because I’m searching

    because I cannot swallow it

    I tried

    for years

    to keep it inside
    to make a life
    that didn’t need this

    but something in me
    refused

    quietly

    consistently

    until it began to show up in my body

    in that pressure
    in that drop
    in those moments
    where everything looks fine

    and still

    something is missing

    this

    this is where it goes

    this page
    this space
    this place where I don’t have to explain
    or prove
    or justify

    this is where I am allowed
    to exist
    without translating myself

    the bird appears here

    or almost does

    mid-flight
    mid-fall
    mid-becoming

    I don’t try to fix it anymore

    I let it stay unclear

    because that’s the only way it feels honest

    I used to think

    if it couldn’t be something
    I could live from

    it wasn’t worth this

    this time
    this attention
    this need

    but now

    I see it differently

    this isn’t about making a living

    this is about not disappearing

    this is about giving shape to something in me that will not stay silent

    and every time
    I let it out

    in lines
    in water
    in words

    something in me
    settles

    not completely

    never completely

    but enough

    to breathe

    and maybe that’s what this is

    not a career
    not a plan

    a place

    where I don’t have to hold it all

    where I can let it move

    where I can let it be seen

    where I can stop pretending

    it isn’t there

    and that

    that is why

    I keep coming back

  • Held

    God is in the wrist
    no, before the wrist
    in that small electric yes
    that happens before I move

    Pencil

    I sit with paper like a woman with too many thoughts

    He says nothing

    Which is how I know it’s Him

    Then—a line

    It goes crooked on purpose

    Leans into green

    Like it’s remembering a forest

    I’ve never seen but somehow miss

    I try to fix it
    He laughs in sunlight

    Watercolor

    Yellow breaks open
    right through the middle of my doubt

    Splits it clean, spills everywhere

    He guides like that
    Not neat
    Not polite

    Not asking if I’m ready just pushing light
    through whatever part of me is still resisting being seen

    My hand follows
    like it’s been waiting its whole life to stop pretending it knows where it’s going —with one drop of color

    Watercolor

    I didn’t plan that reach
    I didn’t plan anything

    That’s the miracle

    God is not in the finished piece

    God is in the ruin of control

    In the moment I let the brush wander and it doesn’t get lost

    He was never waiting
    at the end

    He was in every mark
    I almost didn’t make

    The Woodlands, Texas

  • Omissions III

    you don’t say it
    but it rides shotgun anyway

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    window down, elbow out, that quiet between us doing all the talking like a highway that forgot where it was going

    you ever notice that?

    how a thing can live
    without ever being born just pacing the inside of your chest like a stray that found the door
    but won’t come in

    that’s us

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    you trim the truth
    like a man shaving in bad light

    leave just enough shadow to look like something real

    and I sit there—feeling the weight of it

    I become a sound you almost say and then don’t—and it echoes louder than if you had

    that’s where I live with you

    in the almost
    in the inch before contact
    in the breath you take
    right before you decide not to cross it

    and it’s not that you don’t feel it

    I’ve seen it
    in the way your voice slows down
    like it’s trying not to wake something up

    in the way you stay too long for a man who’s just passing through

    you linger like a question you already know the answer to
    but won’t ask

    and me

    I let it happen
    I let the silence build a house around us
    no doors
    no windows
    just walls made of everything we won’t admit

    funny thing is
    it feels warm in there

    safe, almost

    until it doesn’t

    until you leave
    and the air changes
    and I’m standing in the middle of something
    that never had a name

    Held in Omissions (watercolor)

    trying to explain to myself how something so present can still be missing

    how a man can hold you
    without ever really touching you

    how omission
    quiet, careful, deliberate omission

    can feel more intimate
    than truth

    and here’s the part that stays

    not you
    you go, you always go
    back to the life that has edges, definitions, doors that close

    but this—this unfinished thing this almost this sentence that refuses its period

    it lingers

    in the coffee cup you didn’t finish
    in the chair that still leans toward me
    in the air that remembers the shape of your voice

    and I

    I finally see it for what it is

    not love
    not absence

    but a corridor

    long, dim, echoing
    where we met halfway
    and decided
    without saying it

    to never reach the end

  • Omissions II

    And I

    I walk straight through them

    Tried to forgive the silence by giving it a story

    Told myself
    Some truths are shy
    Some words take longer to arrive

    Some men speak in seasons

    But even the seasons confess

    They arrive

    They leave

    They mark their passing with undeniable change

    I understand
    that omission is not emptiness

    And yet . .

  • Omissions

    I don’t catch you in lies you’re too careful for that.

    You hand me daylight
    without ever mentioning the night you walked through.

    And I
    I stand there, holding a clean sentence feeling the dirt underneath it.

    Something is always missing but never named.

    Like a chair pulled out
    from a table I didn’t see set.

    Like a door still warm
    from being closed
    just before I arrived.

    You speak in completed thoughts, but I hear the hinge—that small metallic truth swinging somewhere just outside the room.

    I tried to name you like weather, to soften the edges of you—but even storms confess.

    Even the tide tells on itself.

    So I begin to doubt
    my own architecture

    maybe the house was always this uneven

    maybe the floor was meant to tilt like this

    maybe the silence is mine.

    But no—it’s the way you curate reality like a careful museum
    every absence framed
    as if it belongs.

    And I walk through it,
    quiet, hands behind my back, trying not to touch
    what isn’t there.

    To be continued

  • Afterlight

    I watched the sun hide
    and the birds went after it

    Habit of following

    not all at once, not in some perfect formation
    you could name or study

    just one lifting then another then more until the sky itself looked like it had decided not to stay still

    like something moved through them and they answered

    no thinking
    no pausing
    no weighing what it meant

    just wing
    and direction

    and me —I stayed

    because that’s what we do

    we stand there
    and understand it

    we know the sun is leaving
    we know it comes back
    we know this is the oldest pattern
    there is

    light goes
    light returns

    we’ve made peace with it or at least we pretend to

    we tell ourselves
    this is how things continue

    and still—they go

    small bodies
    holding the last heat of it
    as if they can feel
    the exact moment
    it slips out of reach

    and they refuse
    to let it go quietly

    they follow past where it makes sense past where there is anything left to follow

    and I watch them
    thinking how strange it is

    they don’t know
    what we know

    they don’t know about tomorrow
    or return
    or the comfort
    of things coming back

    to them
    light is not a promise

    it’s an occurrence

    it was there

    it touched them

    it warmed them

    and now it isn’t

    and that is enough
    to move

    so they move

    and we don’t

    we stay
    we explain
    we name it
    so it hurts less

    we say
    it’s fine
    it’s supposed to happen

    we say
    it will come back

    we say
    wait

    and we do

    we learn how to stand still
    inside loss
    and call it understanding

    and then

    when everything is gone
    when the sky empties itself of even the idea of light

    there’s always one

    Habit of following

    a songbird somewhere
    you can’t see

    still singing

    not louder than the dark
    not enough to change anything

    just steady

    like it missed the ending
    or chose not to believe in it

    and that’s when it turns

    because we say we’re different
    we say we understand

    but we do it too

    just not with wings

    we call things back
    in quieter ways

    in memory
    in longing
    in the way we return
    to what is already gone
    and sit there with it
    as if it might shift

    we replay voices
    we hold onto warmth
    long after it has left the room

    we don’t rise into the sky

    but we follow

    in thought
    in feeling
    in the quiet insistence
    that something that mattered should not end so cleanly

    and I stand there
    between them

    their instinct
    and my knowing

    knowing the sun will return without being called

    knowing there is no need

    and still

    feeling it

    that pull
    deep and unreasonable

    to call it back

    as if, just once

    it might listen

    Habit of Following

  • You come from us

    you come from a woman from a body that carried you without question, from hands that knew you before you spoke, from a kind of care you never had to ask for

    you were held before you understood what holding was, fed before you knew hunger, loved before you knew how to return it

    you were soothed when you didn’t understand your own discomfort
    you were seen before you knew how to be seen, you were answered before you knew how to ask

    and then you grow into a world that teaches you distance teaches you how to move forward, how to leave, how to harden, how to forget what it felt like to be kept

    and you come back to us as men standing in front of women as if we are something new, something to figure out, something to reach

    but we are not new

    we are the same place you once lived inside

    so why do you do this

    why do you stand so close and still not see us

    why do you reach
    without knowing what you’re reaching for

    why do you touch without understanding what you’re holding

    why do you move through us as if we are surface

    not all of you
    but most of you

    and it repeats

    the same distance
    the same absence
    the same quiet disconnect
    as if something in you
    chose forgetting
    over remembering

    because you don’t know us

    not the way we feel you before you speak

    not the way we notice what you don’t say

    not the way we hold what passes through you without you ever stopping to see it

    we feel your hesitation your distraction, your presence when it’s real
    and your absence when it isn’t

    we feel when you arrive
    and when you don’t

    and still

    we are expected to remain

    as if closeness is something that happens
    just because you are near

    but it is not

    it is as if you forgot completely what it was like to be known without asking, to be cared for without earning it, to be held without having to arrive

    and now you move through us as if we are surface—but we are not

    we are still that same quiet place, still able to hold, still able to know

    still capable of seeing you in ways you don’t yet —see yourself

    but no longer willing
    to be forgotten
    while you stand inside us

    you come from us

    and still

    you don’t remember

    how to see us
    how to feel us
    how to meet us

    in the very way
    we once held you

  • Charcoal Nerve

    charcoal—comes from something that burned all the way through its excuses

    no color to charm you
    no gloss to lie for you

    just carbon—the aftertaste of fire
    sitting in your hand

    like it knows exactly what you’re avoiding

    I take it anyway

    it dirties me first
    before

    I make a single mark

    Good

    I don’t trust anything
    that lets me stay clean

    It drags across the surface like it’s pulling something out not placing something down

    a line—too honest

    another—already arguing with me

    there’s no fixing it
    only facing it

    press too hard—it snaps

    hold back—it exposes the hesitation like a cracked voice
    mid-sentence

    it reads the body better than I do

    every tremor
    every second of doubt
    every moment I almost chose to be careful instead of real

    it keeps all of it

    even when I erase
    and I do

    it leaves a smear like a fingerprint at a crime scene

    you were here

    you meant that
    or you didn’t

    but you touched it

    charcoal doesn’t care
    about pretty
    about finished
    about approval

    it cares about contact

    about that split second
    when the hand stops negotiating and just goes

    reckless
    accurate
    unprotected

    it’s not drawing

    it’s exposure

    a slow stripping
    of whatever polish
    I thought I needed

    until what’s left
    isn’t impressive
    isn’t composed

    just true enough
    to make me look away

    and then look back

    because that’s the trap

    once you see it
    you can’t unsee
    the version of yourself
    that showed up in the mark

    not the curated one

    the other one

    the one that doesn’t ask
    to be liked

    only to be left
    on the page
    exactly as it is

    dark
    unfinished
    and impossible
    to clean off completely

  • Nowhere to Land

    what do I do with this

    please tell me

    what does a woman do
    when a man can sit in front of her feel everything

    and then walk out of it like it never asked anything of him

    what do I do with it

    when the body won’t settle

    when the hands won’t rest

    when something in me feels slightly outside of itself

    like I’m watching
    my own mind
    try to make sense of you

    of the way you stayed
    and didn’t stay

    of the way something opened and you closed it
    without even touching it

    what have you done

    no—what has this done

    because it sits in me like something unfinished
    like something that refuses to find a place

    and I keep going back to the same few seconds

    the same shift the same moment you became someone else without moving

    and I’m here
    holding both versions the one who leaned in

    And the one
    who looked at me after
    like nothing had crossed

    and it makes me feel

    ill

    not sick
    not broken

    just… off

    like something in me
    knows this mattered

    and something in you
    wouldn’t stay

    and I don’t know
    how to put that down

    I don’t know
    how to return

    because —I have left before

    I have walked away
    from things that broke me

    I know how to go

    I know how to close a door

    but this

    this feels like something
    I stepped into

    that won’t let me out and there’s this thought
    I can’t quiet

    what if I made it all up

    what if it only ever lived
    on my side

    and still

    even with that

    I can’t walk away

    because I didn’t imagine
    the feeling

    I felt it—fully

    and maybe that’s it

    maybe I went all the way in and you didn’t stay there

    and now I’m left with something that feels real

    but has nowhere to land and tonight —I tried to draw it and my hands trembled

    like they knew before I did— what I was touching

    and I had to stop

    because something in it made me nauseous

    like seeing it outside of me

    made it undeniable

    and now—there’s nowhere to put it back

    so I come here to digitally cure myself

    and still —it stays awake in me and I keep thinking how can you sleep

    how can you sleep
    knowing this

    or not knowing it at all

    how can you close your eyes when something like this

    is still moving in me

    Nowhere to Land

  • Living Inside Movement

    (2:00 a.m.)

    I wasn’t trying to write.

    I picked up charcoal
    because I needed somewhere to put it.

    Whatever this is. Just lines. Nothing finished. Nothing that stays still long enough to make sense.

    I kept trying to shape it
    into something I could recognize.

    Couldn’t.

    Every time I thought I had it—It moved.

    So I stopped trying to make it look like anything.

    Just let my hand follow it. That’s when it felt closer.

    Not right—just… closer.

    Same thing here.

    I’m not writing to explain it. I don’t even think I can.

    I’m writing because it won’t sit still inside me.

    Because it keeps happening and then disappearing like it was never there.

    And I’m left with it
    Whatever’s left of it
    trying to hold onto something that doesn’t hold back.

    So this isn’t a story.

    It’s not even a thought all the way through.

    It’s just me trying to catch something in the moment it almost becomes real.

    Before it moves again.

    ‘Living Inside Movement’

    I keep seeing you
    in the middle of things

    Never where anything starts, never where anything ends

    You just show up, and I let you

    Like it’s something I agreed to a long time ago without realizing it

    We talk—we always talk—about everything that doesn’t matter

    Because the one thing that does would change everything

    And we’re not willing to do that

    So we don’t

    We just stay here
    Living inside movement,
    letting it keep going
    because stopping it
    would force it to become something real

    And I think that’s
    what’s wearing me down

    Not you
    Not even this

    Just the way
    it never gets to land the way I feel it and then have to pretend
    I don’t

    The way you look at me
    like something is there
    and then leave like nothing is

    I don’t think you’re lying

    I think

    You’ve learned
    how to live inside it
    without letting it touch
    the parts of your life
    that would break

    I haven’t

    And maybe that’s the difference between us

    You go back to something solid, something defined,
    something that makes sense to the world

    And I stay here—in something that only exists when you’re standing in front of me

    And I hate that sometimes

    I hate how real it feels
    when you’re here, and how quickly it disappears when you’re not

    I hate that I’ve learned
    how to adjust to that

    How to hold it without asking for more

    Without asking you to choose it

    And I’m tired

    Not loudly—Not in a way anyone would see

    Just in that quiet place
    where something keeps going long after it should have stopped

    And still—I stay

    Not because I don’t know better

    Not because I’m waiting

    But because something in me still believes
    this isn’t nothing

    That it matters in some way that doesn’t have a place to exist

    So I stay—in something that moves, but never arrives

    And maybe one day
    I’ll get tired enough
    to step out of it

    Or maybe I won’t

    Maybe I’ll just keep
    living here—in this quiet, unfinished space

    Where something real
    keeps happening
    without ever becoming anything

    I can call mine

  • NightBird

    Since when do birds sing at night ?

    I lie there listening

    Wondering

    If I’ve missed this my whole life

    Or if something in me has only now grown quiet enough to hear it

    It doesn’t sound mistaken

    It doesn’t sound lost

    Just one note

    Then another

    Falling into the dark as if it belongs there

    Since when does the night allow this?

    I thought it was meant
    to close things

    To gather everything inward

    To soften it into silence

    But the bird does not soften

    It continues

    As though the hour is not an ending but an opening

    And I begin to wonder

    Since when have we decided there is a right time to be heard ?

    Because the bird does not wait

    It does not hold back
    until morning makes sense of it

    It sings because it is awake

    And I am awake too

    In the same dark

    Under the same quiet sky

    Carrying something just as restless

    Just as certain

    Just as unwilling to be quiet

    And it comes to me simple, undeniable

    We are not different

    We have only learned

    To wait

    The bird has not

    It sings as if the hour
    cannot contain it

    And I lie there listening not only to the sound

    But to the space it opens in me

    And the question it leaves behind

    Since when did I begin to believe – I had to be silent just because it was night?

    ‘NightBird’

  • Metáfora II

    It is the precise hand that separates me

    From what I was permitted to name

    And what I have always known beneath the visible

    I say – body’
    and mean a threshold

    Just a place where things pass through
    whether I consent or not

    I say ‘silence’
    and mean a room
    that remembers everything

    I say ‘love’

    and mean the undoing
    though I’ve called it other things to make it easier to keep

    And here in saying one thing and meaning another

    I begin to breathe not freely but sufficiently

    As though metaphor
    does the work for me

    As though air is easier to accept when it arrives
    in disguise

    I do not take the world
    as it is

    I take it as something adjacent, tide, light

    A turning I can tolerate and in that adjustment
    it becomes manageable

    Almost beautiful

    And I

    Still composed, still intact in appearance

    Open just enough to continue

    Without having to call it
    what it is

  • Metáfora

    My thoughts wander

    Barefoot and unashamed

    I say ‘leaf’

    And I mean

    The whole earth unfolding

    I say ‘breath’

    And I mean

    The shared air of all who have live for me

    Nothing is singular here

    Nothing stands alone

    Metaphor is my great companion

    It walks beside me

    Unbuttoned

    Unafraid

    Naming the world twice

    So I may know it

    Once more deeply

    It takes the smallest thing in my hands

    And makes it vast

    A blade of grass

    A pulse

    Leaving me forever altered

    And in love

    Because, love is

    The rupture
    The bright unignorable incision that renders the literal, impossible

    It is the precise hand
    that separates me
    from the wound

    And from the words
    that attempt to dress it

    I am not the wound
    I am not the language
    that softens it

    I am the edge

    And

    The exact place of entry

  • Art of Keeping

    Unveil me

    And call this moment truth

    Or what you will

    I have been so many things
    A voice that softened itself
    A silence that learned to endure
    A hand that held
    more than it was meant to carry

    I have been a bird
    Singing in red
    A wound that would not close

    I gathered myself inward
    Folded light into smaller shapes
    Asked what hurt
    to become less visible

    But it remained

    Not louder just closer

    So I stopped asking it

    To disappear

    I let it stand as it is

    Unhidden
    Unresolved
    And still reaching

    Learning

    The careful art of keeping

  • Fluency

    what removed me
    from solitude

    entered with
    wings half-lit

    it gathered in my mouth

    symbols forming

    against the soft interior
    of my speech

    my afflictions
    between hairline and skull

    became fluent

    abundant
    uncontained

    loving me

    like a man
    who knows his darkness

    well enough
    to let it breathe

    outside of him

    visible
    unhidden

    still reaching
    toward light

  • Love Lives Here

    I step out of my home
    and the wind, gentle and unhurried

    Finds the curve of my spine

    Like a hand remembering a shape it once held

    The trees in their full green bodies

    The sky without boundary

    The birds

    Writing their quick signatures across it

    And I, too, am written there

    I do not deny what stirs in me

    I include it

    This warmth that leans toward another

    It belongs to the same order as sunlight

    As breath

    As the turning of the earth

    I say there is love here

    And the feeling is ethereal
    Yet rooted

  • Woman

    You ask me why I love being a woman.

    I could speak of the ways we are taught to tend.

    To hold, to soften.

    A rocking chair postured in selflessness.

    Moving for others, rarely for itself.

    That is one truth, but not the only one.

    There is a fullness I came to. Without asking.

    Not given, not earned, something that lived in me long before I knew
    how to name it.

    The fullness I carry
    belongs to no one
    who might touch me.

    It is not awakened, it does not wait.

    I have lived in opposition to my own shape, called it discipline, called it virtue.

    Until even silence grew tired of my resistance.

    Now there is no argument.

    My body

    Stands, soft, unrevised.

    If I am loved, it is incidental, a passing light through a room
    already lit.

  • Preface

    I did not mean to write this.

    It came the way certain things do. Without asking, without a plan.

    As if something in me had grown tired of remaining hidden.

    Nothing here is finished. Nothing has been made whole.

    This digital space holds what has shifted, what softened, what could not return to where it once rested.

    If there is tenderness, it is small and easily missed.

    If there is opening, it is not sudden, only a slow turning toward something.

    I am still learning to trust.

    There was a time I believed that staying closed was the only way to remain intact.

    That if I held myself carefully enough, quietly enough, nothing could reach me that might take more than I was willing to give.

    And I became very good at it.

    I learned how to remain how to speak, how to move through the world with precision, with control, with a kind of quiet restraint that made everything appear unchanged.

    But there is a quiet cost to that kind of living.

    You begin to disappear from yourself.

    You begin to forget what it feels like to exist without guarding every part of you.

    You begin to live as something contained, not something alive.

    And somewhere in that without my permission something in me began to resist.

    Not loudly.

    Not all at once.

    Just enough to make it impossible to return to what I was.

    And that is where these words come from.

    From the place I kept hidden, not because it was empty, but because it was too full.

    From a self that has always spoken in images

    In petals that refuse their bloom.

    In soil that remembers everything.

    In light that does not arrive but waits until it is allowed.

    My metaphors are not decoration.

    They are translation.

    They are the closest I can come to saying what I have carried, without breaking it open too quickly.

    Without losing what it means to me in the telling.

    If you know how to read them.

    You will know me.

    Not entirely.

    But in the places where language hesitates.

    Where meaning slips.

    Where something is felt before it is understood.

    Because . .

    That is where I live.

    Between what I can say and what I cannot.

    Between clarity and concealment.

    Between the self I offer.

    And the one I keep just out of reach.

    Words arrive to me.

    And I must place them somewhere, before they begin to weep within me.

    They do not come when I am ready.

    They come when I am unguarded.

    Late, when the world has quieted.

    When the hour no longer belongs to anything but what I have kept inside.

    Words keep me awake.

    They find me in the stillness of 1 a.m.

    Insistent, unresolved as if they have been waiting for the moment I can no longer hold them back.

    And I write not because I choose to, but because I cannot leave them there.

    Unplaced.

    Unspoken.

    Turning inward until they begin to break me open.

    So this . .

    All of this.

    Is not a narrative.

    It is not a resolution.

    It is a record of what happens when I allow myself to remain present with what I feel.

    Without forcing it into something easier, cleaner, or more complete.

    Read this as you would something living.

    With patience.

    With care, without needing it to become anything other than what it is.

    Because I am still here learning how to exist within myself without retreating.

    Learning how to stay when every instinct tells me to close.

    Learning how to let something be seen without disappearing in the process.

    And these words . .

    They are simply what remains.

    When I choose, even briefly, to no longer hide.

  • Petal Riser

    You take me the way the sun finds a flower that never learned its morning

    Not with warmth, but with a patience that does not leave

    I had grown used to the dark

    The kind that settles into the root

    Until even the idea of opening feels like a mistake

    The garden did not question me

    It let me remain folded into myself

    Petal against petal, a small life no one could enter

    And no one could ruin

    It worked

    Nothing reached me

    Nothing stayed

    I waited for the taking

    I knew how it went—how anything that sees you open does not stop

    So I held myself tighter

    Closed even against the light

    As if survival meant never being seen soft again

    And still

    Something in me began to give

    Not bloom, never bloom

    Just a slight failure in my keeping

    A single petal loosening as if it had grown tired of protecting what no one had come for

    I felt it like grief

    Sharp, quiet, uninvited

    The body remembering something it had buried to keep living

    You saw it

    And you did nothing

    You did not reach

    You did not take

    You did not ask for more

    You stayed as if that one small opening was already too much to ask of me

    And that

    That is what broke me

    Because I had been taught that anything that stays will hurt you eventually

    That love is only a slower kind of loss

    But you

    You stayed exactly where I left you

    As if I did not have to give you anything else

    And so

    I opened a little more

    Not for you

    Not even for the light

    But because, for the first time

    I felt something I did not recognize

    The absence of harm

    And it was unbearable

    Because it meant

    I had been closed all this time for something that was not here

    And now

    I do not know how far I can open

    I do not know if the dark will return

    But something in me

    Something small, tired, still alive

    Keeps loosening despite it

    Because you did not take me when you could have

    Because you did not break me when I was already open enough to be broken

    Because you stayed long enough for me to feel what it is to be held in the light

    And not disappear

  • Estuary

    Your blood is like mine

    Not in name

    Not in the quiet archives of family

    But in the way it rises when the world leans close

    It is a red tide

    Salted with memory

    Restless beneath the skin

    Moving as the sea moves

    Returning, returning

    Even when there is nowhere left to arrive

    I do not need to see it

    I know it by your nearness

    As though the hour itself had softened for you

    How your leaving bends

    Becoming a slow eclipse that refuses its own completion

    There is something in you that does not close

    Mine answers

    It lifts within me

    A warm insistence

    A quiet rebellion against distance

    We are not the same

    No, we are not

    But there is a crossing

    A hidden estuary

    Where your current meets mine

    There, what should disperse gathers

    What should end, lingers

    Like heat in the evening walls

    Like fruit left open to the sun

    Like the last light that refuses to withdraw from the body of the day

    Your blood is like mine

    It does not forget the shore it has touched

  • Vanilla Sky

    Light moved differently today, not in rays

    But in long, quiet exhalations

    Spilling over rooftops

    Over your shoulders

    Over the place where my name almost lived on your lips

    Everything was touched

    By a softened glow

    Not the kind that blinds

    But the kind that remembers what it once was

    I stood there

    Half in shadow

    Half inside a color

    That had no name

    Except the one my body gave it

    When you looked at me like that

    Like time had loosened its grip

    Just enough

    For us to exist without consequence

    There was no urgency in you

    No hunger that devours

    Only that quiet pull

    The kind that gathers in the spaces between words in a shared cup

    In the unnoticed exchange of breath and heat

    And something dangerously close to peace

    If I closed my eyes

    I could still feel it

    That horizon bending slightly toward us

    As if the world itself were conspiring to keep us suspended there

    A moment longer

    Not lovers

    Not strangers

    Just the two of us

    Held gently

    Inside a sky

  • Voltage III

    Do not come near me carelessly

    I have become fluent in the exquisite discipline of restraint

    There was a time

    When every bright impulse might have escaped me at once

    Without reverence for consequence

    I no longer belong to that kind of ruin

    Now I know the holy intelligence of what is withheld

    The grandeur of a silence so charged it can alter the temperature of a room

    You stand there

    And the air rearranges itself

    Not because of touch

    That would be too simple

    Something passes between us

    Subtle as a filament beneath glass

    Invisible until it burns

    Refined enough to make stillness feel like an event

    I do not reach

    I let the distance glow

    I let it become unbearable with elegance

    Because desire, when it has matured beyond appetite, does not beg for completion

    It acquires gravity, and everything in its field begins, quietly, to lean

    So if I cross toward you

    It will not be from weakness

    Nor from hunger without thought

    It will be because

    I have measured the cost of contact

    And found it beautiful

    And when I touch you

    It will not feel like beginning

    It will feel like recognition at its most dangerous

    As though something ancient in the blood had been waiting

    For precisely this permission

    The End

  • Voltage II

    But listen

    Even lightning

    Must gather itself before it cleaves the sky

    I have gathered

    I have stood inside the anatomy of collapse and named it rehearsal

    Have felt the surge rise beneath my ribs

    And chosen—not to extinguish it—but to contain

    There is power in the unspent

    There is dominion in the held breath that does not betray itself

    You think stillness is absence?

    No—it is a field of charged quiet

    A storm disciplined into elegance

    A body that could unravel the room and instead chooses to remain

    So do not come near me expecting softness alone

    I am composed of forces that negotiate with fire

    That bend impulse into precision

    That hold entire voltages behind an unshaken gaze

    And if I touch you—it will not be by accident

    It will be because I have decided exactly how much of the current you can survive

    To be continued . .

  • Voltage

    I am not the tremor you misread as fragility

    I am the voltage beneath silk

    The disciplined chaos that chooses not to unravel

    My pulse does not betray me

    It rehearses storms

    Each errant rhythm

    A clandestine rehearsal of thunder

    I have already survived

    Do not confuse my stillness with surrender

    I have swallowed entire tempests without naming them

    Have stood inside the structure of collapse

    And called it breathing

    There are galaxies stitched behind my ribs

    Wild, incandescent things

    And yet I sit here

    Composed

    Drinking the quiet

    Like it belongs to me

    I do not chase

    I do not beg

    I do not fracture at absence

    I become it

    I turn distance into dominion

    Silence into a language only the deliberate can read

    To be continued . .

  • Color • Wake

    Love is

    Not the loud red of arrival

    Not the blue that once named the animal

    But something more patient

    A hue that does not ask to be witnessed

    It gathers in the soft underside of things

    In the pulse behind my wrist

    In the dim gold of late afternoon

    Resting on skin that has known both fire and its absence

    I am no longer painted

    I am permeated

    A slow diffusion

    Like pigment released into water

    Not dissolving

    But becoming indistinguishable from it

    There are colors now that do not belong to sight

    The warmth that lingers after touch

    The quiet violet of being understood

    The pale, infinite white of a moment that asks for nothing

    And still

    Somewhere beneath it all

    A deeper tone remains

    Unnameable, steady as breath beneath sleep

    It does not bloom

    It does not fade

    It moves, slow and certain

    Through every hidden place in me

    Until I am no longer carrying color

    I am the place it comes alive

  • Chromatic • Studies

    Color does not sit on me

    It enters

    The way pigment enters canvas

    Pressed

    Worked in

    Slowly absorbed

    Until it can no longer be removed

    I feel it first

    As a warmth

    A red laid beneath everything

    A ground that breathes through the surface, rising in soft intervals with my pulse

    It is not placed

    It spreads thin at first, a wash of heat, then deepening

    Thickening, until it holds inside me like something alive

    Gold moves differently—

    It lingers

    A glaze across the ribs, caught in the curve of breath

    Like light resting on bare skin just long enough to be felt

    And blue

    Blue opens me

    A slow saturation

    Wet into wet, bleeding through the edges of my body until even the quiet begins to expand

    There is no clean boundary

    No edge that does not soften under contact

    Everything blends

    Color into body, body into language

    Language into something that cannot be separated once it begins

    My hands know this

    The way they move, the way they press, the way they follow what has already started beneath the surface

    Every mark carries sensation

    A pressure, a drag, a yielding

    As if creation itself were a kind of touch that does not stop at the skin

    And I let it happen

    This layering, this slow insistence, this quiet undoing of distance

    Until I am no longer working with color

    But inside it

    Held in it

    Moving with it

    A body that has become its own surface

    Warm

    Open

    Continuously receiving what enters and chooses to stay

  • Rearranging

    You arrive here not as a beginning—but as something rewritten by its own hands.

    Your children have stepped out of your body into their own weather, calling you less, needing you in quieter ways—like a photograph still warm from the sun.

    Your parents soften into time, their voices folding, their strength becoming memory while they are still standing.

    And you—you are no longer who you were when everything required you.

    Now, you require yourself. You move differently—with a kind of knowing that drips slowly from the center of your chest.

    This is not loss.

    This is space.

    A clearing where your name sounds new again.

    Your hands—once full of everyone—begin to open, and in that opening something wild and unrestrained begins to breathe.

    You are not starting over.

    You are rearranging—like light when it realizes it no longer has to prove its brightness.

  • Inescapable (III)

    I have begun to release what was never entrusted to me—not you, not entirely—but the silent labor of sustaining what you leave unfinished.

    There is a distinction now—subtle, but irrevocable.

    It did not arrive through resolve, but through depletion—through that slow recognition.

    That devotion without reciprocity becomes erosion. I no longer extend myself toward you with the same unguarded impulse.

    Not because the feeling has diminished—but because it has clarified.

    You remain consistent in your inconsistencies—present in fragments, attentive in intervals, returning just enough to ensure nothing dissolves.

    And I—I have ceased to assemble meaning from what is partial.

    There is a composure in me now that was not there before—not detachment, not absence—but a contained awareness that does not pursue what does not arrive whole.

    I have come to understand that what holds substance does not require persuasion, does not depend on endurance, does not ask to be maintained by one.

    So I withdraw my effort from what was never equally carried.

    Not in resistance, not in finality—but in preservation.

    You remain within that familiar distance—accessible, yet never fully offered.

    And I remain—but altered. No longer oriented toward you, but returned to my own center of gravity.

    There is a stillness here that does not ache—a quiet reordering of where I place my energy, of what I permit to remain unfinished within me.

    And in this—without declaration, without urgency—I arrive at a certainty I do not need to speak aloud: what does not meet me in its fullness will no longer hold me in its absence.

    Because I have stood in the quiet of this long enough to understand the difference between what is shared and what is endured alone.

    And I have endured enough. Not loudly, not visibly—but in the private chambers of a feeling that was never returned with equal weight.

    And still—I do not regret you. Not the moments, not the knowing, not even the cost. But I can no longer remain where I am not fully received.

    And so—without resistance, without bitterness, without the need to be understood—I release what never chose me in the way I chose it.

    And in the quiet that follows, in the space you no longer occupy in the same way—there is something unexpectedly tender: the return of myself. And with that knowing—unforced, undeniable—I remain whole.

    The End

  • Inescapable (II)

    Did not arrive at this lightly.

    This quiet, persistent regard has established itself within me. Without any assurance of return.

    As though it had always known how to inhabit me before – I had the language to refuse it.

    You were never meant to reside here in this manner. I have known you within the ordinary hours.

    In conversation that carried no weight. In laughter that did not ask to be remembered.

    In that quiet familiarity that rendered everything. Effortless and unguarded.

    But also, in the moments where composure failed me. Where I did not conceal myself, where something in me gave way without resistance.

    You have seen me there—

    Not as an observer.

    But as one who remained, who did not turn away from what was difficult to hold, who received what I had not intended to reveal.

    You have known my silence with a precision that unsettles me, recognized its weight before I could name it.

    Read the subtle alterations in me with a clarity that has, at times, exceeded my own.

    There is a familiarity in you that reaches beyond language.

    As though you have learned the internal blueprints of me, without ever being instructed.

    And somewhere within that knowing, something altered.

    Not abruptly, not sufficiently to be named. But with the quiet inevitability of something taking root beneath the surface of what appeared unchanged.

    I care for you in a way that does not demand. And yet- cannot convincingly claim.

    It requires nothing.

    There is a tenderness in it, yes. But also a gravity that settles into me with a patience I cannot interrupt.

    Because to care in this manner is to remain within the presence of something that neither fully arrives nor entirely withdraws.

    Something that exists in a suspended condition between what is felt and what is permitted.

    You exist within that interval. Not absent, not wholly present, and still you alter me.

    Not through declaration, not through certainty, but through the quiet persistence of your being.

    Through the way you remain just near enough to be undeniable, and just beyond what I can claim.

    Not for what might be, not for what has not come to pass, but for what is.

    This quiet, unclaimed connection that neither of us has been willing to relinquish.

    It rests between us. Like something living.

    Unacknowledged, and yet fully formed.

    Something that continues not because it is sustained, but because it has not been undone.

    And I do not resent you for it.

    I simply recognize what it asks of me. To feel without resolution, to remain without conclusion, to understand without release.

    And in this immensity

    I no longer attempt to resist.

    To be a continued . .

  • Inescapable

    This is written from a place of quiet weariness. Where I see clearly and still do not leave, where something remains. Not because it is easy, but because it will not loosen its hold on me. There are moments when it gathers in my chest, so completely I could cry from exhaustion. Not because I do not understand. But because I understand, and remain.

    ••••••••

    When you grow tired.

    Understand that I have been standing for some time – within a quiet depletion.

    A subtle undoing that gathers without spectacle without witness – without relief.

    It accumulates – not from absence – but from the persistence of what remains – from the repeated deferral of what has already taken shape.

    In everything – but admission – In moving alongside something undeniable – While denying its rightful form in preserving composure.

    While something within me presses with increasing clarity – Against its containment- Against the careful discipline -We impose upon it.

    I recognize it – In the measured duration of your nearness – In the deliberate incompleteness.

    Leaving me suspended As though finality itself Were a boundary – We are unwilling to cross – As though definition- Would demand more than we are prepared to concede.

    And yet – What exists does not diminish – It gathers – It consolidates itself – In the spaces you leave unoccupied – In the quiet disarray – Of my interior world – In the gradual yielding of the structures – I once believed sufficient.

    There is no reprieve in this – No restoration. Only a sustained interior tension. Precise. Unarticulated. And yet entirely present.

    That neither dissipates. Not resolves into something gentler. It is exacting in its continuity.

    It endures without permission. Without confirmation. Without the courtesy of resolution.

    And still – I remain within its influence. Not out of uncertainty.

    For I – Perceive it with an exactness. That admits no illusion. But because there is within you – A force – I do not readily dismiss.

    A quiet insistence – That continues to draw me inward. Despite the fatigue it leaves in its wake.

    It is not softness. It is not yearning alone. It is something more exacting.

    Something that persists. Even as I grow weary of its lack of conclusion.

    Even as I begin to understand – the cost of its continuation. There are moments in which I consider departure – Not as escape – But as preservation.

    And yet even in that consideration – I feel its return – Not as urgency.

    But as inevitability. And so I persist. Not unaware. Not untouched. Not unaltered. But still unwilling – Or perhaps unable to withdraw from what continues to exist between us with a certainty that requires nothing.

    That offers nothing. And yet remains – Unrelinquished – Unresolved – And entirely – Inescapable.

    To be continued . .

  • Constancy

    I pause the day to hold you

    Your small body

    That has never known excess

    Only devotion

    Ten years of the same quiet loyalty

    Of returning to me

    Without question

    Without distance

    You have so little to give

    A small voice

    A fragile frame

    A life that asks for almost nothing

    And still

    You love me

    With something that feels immense

    It humbles me

    The way you choose me again

    And again

    As if I have always been enough

    I hold you

    Not because you need me

    But because

    I need to remember

    How love can be this simple

    This faithful

    This complete

    •

    Happy 10th

    Sweet boy, of mine

  • Blue Animal (III)

    There are forces

    That do not announce themselves

    They gather

    Like constellations

    Assembling behind the visible sky

    Like a stone

    Learning slowly to become a cathedral

    Without ever being told it is sacred

    This is where we arrive

    Not at the edge of desire but beyond it

    Where even longing feels too small to hold what has taken root

    Something vast has entered the body

    Not to burn it

    Not to claim it

    But to widen it

    I feel it in the architecture of breath

    In the way silence now carries weight

    As if every quiet moment were holding up a ceiling of stars

    You are no longer something I reach for

    You are the shift in gravity

    That reorders everything

    The unseen axis around which my inner world turns without resistance

    And I

    I am no longer surface

    I have become depth itself

    A chamber where light arrives altered

    Where time forgets its urgency

    And lingers

    As if it, too

    Discovered reverence

    There is no pursuit here

    No distance to close

    Only this immense, wordless recognition

    As if something ancient

    Has finally found the shape

    It was always meant to inhabit

    Blue animal

    You were never the storm

    You were the sky learning how to hold it

    And I

    Named your endless thirst a weakness

    As if oceans could apologize

    For their depth

    As if magnitude

    Were something

    To be contained

    The end

  • Blue Animal (II)

    YOU ARE

    The undertow

    I mistook for stillness

    The quiet muscle beneath the surface

    Pulling whole coastlines without sound

    You do not ask

    You rearrange

    Salt enters me the way memory does

    Without permission

    YOU ARE

    A tide that studies my fractures

    Filling them slowly

    Until – I forget

    Where I end

    And you begin

    My body

    A map

    You do not read

    Only erase

    YOU ARE

    Who takes the names

    I gave myself

    And returns them

    Wet

    Unrecognizable

    YOU ARE

    Not hunger

    But the patience of it

    The long blue waiting

    That knows

    That I am learning

    How to stand

    At the edge of you

    Without dissolving

    I am learning

    How to keep one bone

    Unclaimed by the sea

    YOU ARE

    A surge

    Of breath

    That turns to liquid

    Just before contact

    Teaching my every nerve to anticipate you

    YOU ARE

    The pull behind restraint

    The place where my hands

    Forget their obedience

    Again

    And again

    To be continued . .

  • Blue Animal

    YOU ARE

    Like the sea

    You write me

    Inhale me

    YOU ARE

    A cold-lipped, deliberate, blue animal with a memory for bone

    Taking my scattered language

    My driftwood vows

    My soft, collapsing promises and worries

    In your mouth

    YOU ARE

    The shore

    Over the paleness of a white page

    Dragging me across it line by line

    Until my silence leaves a mark

    I have seen your tide

    Bending the nudeness of my body

    Like something hungrier

    Something that loves the undoing of my hands

    Ruining me

    Making relics of what I have tried to forget

    To be continued . .

  • Body of rain

    Rain writes on me

    With a thousand

    Soft hands

    It does not rush

    I walk into it

    As one

    Walks into a memory

    Already known

    Already trembling

    It falls on my mouth

    My eyelids

    The hollow at my neck

    Where even I have hesitated to linger

    And still

    It stays

    As if my body

    Were a country it had always intended to discover slowly

    As if every drop

    Were a vow spoken in water

    Knowing me

    Not all at once

    But completely

  • Symmetries

    Stood inside myself

    As one stands in a garden

    Already bloomed

    Not searching

    Not gathering

    Only aware

    Of the fragrance

    There were moments

    That brushed against me

    Soft as wind through leaves

    They did not carry me away

    I let it pass

    Through the open doors of my senses

    Without closing them

    Without following

    Because I now know

    That not everything

    Must be held

    Some things

    Are meant to be felt

    And left intact

    I remain settled

    In my very own skin

    Intentional

    Unchanged

    Somehow

    More than myself

  • Tender Architecture

    Tilt my throat to the sky

    As if I belong to the sun

    Not to be chosen

    Not to be touched

    But to be taken

    By something

    That does not ask

    My name

    But here

    Light arrives

    Like a blade

    I do not flinch

    I let it see me

    And my pulse that has carried

    Too many unsaid things

    I have been quiet

    In rooms

    That did not deserve me

    I have folded myself

    Into smaller weather

    I do not lower my face

    I do not hide

    The tender architecture

    Of being alive

  • Where noise ends

    I built this house so windows could be more than just an opening to escape from

    There is a chair that remembers the shape of my spine

    A floor that does not demand I stand

    Even the silence here is not silence

    It hums low

    Like a mother

    Half awake – watching

    Her children sleep

    Here – I bring

    My hands to my mouth

    As if to keep something in

    Or to keep the world out

    I am not crying

    But something has already passed through me

    A small

    Deliberate brightness

    Something I chose

    And kept it

    Tonight I feel

    As if I might spill

    But nothing spills

    Only a slow return

    A gathering of scattered light back into the body

    How strange

    To be this tired

    And still feel something holy

    Not joy – not quite

    But the absence of noise

    That lets joy breathe

  • Undertow IV

    I am intact

    I repeat this like fact

    Like law

    Still – something tilts

    When you appear inside a sentence

    Not wanting

    Not waiting

    Something closer to being marked without consent

    My body notices before I do

    A flicker

    A tightening

    As if a wire had been brushed somewhere beneath the skin

    You speak

    And it is ordinary

    So ordinary it unsettles me

    Because nothing in you reaches

    Yet something in me answers

    I refuse it – a future

    I deny it – a shape

    Still – it lingers

    Not asking

    Not leaving

    And I

    I gather myself around it

    Contained

    Deliberate

    Even this betrays me

    And still

    We remain only what we say

    The End

  • Undertow III

    And still

    I am not afraid

    I have swallowed

    Darker things, than this

    I have carried absence

    The undertow is not cruel

    It is exact

    It strips me

    Not of love, but of illusion

    What remains

    Is something harder

    Something luminous in its fracture

    A pulse that does not ask to be held

    A body that does not confuse

    Touch with arrival

    If you reach for me now

    You will not find the me that floated toward you

    Like an offering

    You will find depth

    You will find pressure

    You will find a silence

    And still

    There is heat here

    Strange

    Feral

    Uncharted

    The kind that burns

    Without flame

    The kind that lives

    In the center of a woman

    Who has learned

    How to disappear

    Without ever leaving

    I am no longer asking to be saved

    I am becoming the thing

    That survives the drowning

    To be continued . .

  • Undertow II

    And I

    A chamber of salt and voltage, you flicker at the edge

    Not absence, not presence, just a disturbance, in the surface of things

    Your voice, a thin wire that fails to conduct

    I have outgrown the need to translate you

    See how I stand now

    Unspooling light from my own marrow

    No more orbit

    No more leaning

    Even the stars burn cleaner here

    Without your gravity

    Go

    Become rumor

    Become distance

    Become nothing I must answer

    I remain exact

    Electric

    Entirely my own

    To be continued . .

  • Undertow

    I come here

    Observe myself

    From the inside

    There’s a sea in there

    Influenced by shooting stars

    With enough spark

    To resist your charm

    In this reality

    You become a bird

    That speaks in maritime

    To be continued . .

  • Sunblood III

    and now

    it settles

    not gone
    not ever that

    i feel it still

    in the quiet parts of me
    where things don’t ask
    to be explained

    it isn’t soft

    no

    it has teeth

    it knows how to stay
    without asking permission

    and i

    i let it

    i don’t reach for you

    that would be too easy
    too human

    and this

    this – is something else

    something that doesn’t beg

    doesn’t promise

    doesn’t belong

    it just exists

    between that space
    where nothing is said
    and everything is understood

    i could pull it closer

    i could burn it out

    but both would ruin it

    so i leave it

    untouched
    unnamed
    alive

    because there is a kind of love

    that doesn’t need a future

    to prove
    it happened

    and a kind of hunger

    that learns
    to live

    without being fed

    and still

    it stays

    not louder
    not weaker

    just deeper

    like something
    that chose

    to become
    part of me

    The End

  • Sunblood II

    and still
    light does not leave

    it settles

    low- under the skin

    i move through rooms
    as if carrying a second sun

    hidden but insistent

    everything touches it

    water
    glass
    my own hands

    and i feel it

    something
    that asks to be kept

    even in absence

    even in the long
    unlit hours

    you are not here

    and still

    something of you
    circulates

    not memory

    something warmer
    more exact

    like heat
    trapped in stone

    after the day is gone

    i try to name it

    but language fails

    it always fails

    so i do not name it

    i carry it

    this quiet
    this gold
    this undoing

    until my shadow

    begins to burn in glow

    To be continued . .

  • Sunblood

    i did not fall into you
    i opened

    like a wound that recognized
    its own knife

    you arrived quietly
    no thunder – no claim

    and still
    everything in me
    shifted its allegiance

    i was whole before you

    i tell myself this
    like a prayer that doesn’t hold

    yet now

    there is a before
    that feels uninhabited

    you touch so little

    and still
    i am rearranged

    light does this
    it enters and suddenly
    the room remembers its dust

    you stand in me

    like something uninvited
    and necessary

    and i

    i become
    terribly available to absence

    you leave

    this is your gift

    this is your violence

    to exist in me without weight

    to burn without flame

    tell me

    what is this

    that asks nothing

    and takes
    everything

    i do not call it love

    love is too small

    too human

    too forgivable

    this is something
    that survives

    even when
    you are not here

    and i

    i remain

    lit

    and ruined

    by it

    To be continued . .

  • Sunburn

    I was a quiet landscape before you

    A single purposed bird

    Illimitably moving

    Towards – color

    A consciousness

    Where nothing is taken

    Nothing is given

    And still the earth opens

    As if it cannot bear to remain one

    I loved you here

    Long after the sun withdrew its hand

  • Arriver

    Today

    My heart

    Lost its rhythm for a moment

    Not like fear

    Not like pain

    Like a bird forgetting the pattern of its wings mid-flight

    Startled by the sudden awareness of the sky

    I told you, just that

    And you

    You did not question the sky

    You became it

    You held me

    The way gravity holds the earth

    Without force

    Without permission

    Without asking if it should

    And my body

    Which had been speaking in fragments

    Fell back into a language

    Older than thought

    But you

    You do not stay

    You are not made of staying

    You are like tide

    Like wind

    Like something

    That belongs to movement

    And I

    I do not ask

    The ocean

    To become a shore

    I have learned

    What it is to live

    Without arrival

  • Almost Mine

    I am not unsure

    Of what I feel

    Only of where to place it

    It lingers

    Like morning

    Through an open window

    Resting on me

    Softly warming

    What I thought

    Had settled

    But never staying long enough

    To belong

    You are

    Easy as breath

    Something I don’t notice

    Until you’re gone

    And then

    Everything feels

    Just a little heavier

    There is something

    Between us

    It finds me

    Without asking

    Pulls me closer

    And then returns

    To where it must

    Leaving behind

    The feeling

    Of having been near

    I don’t name it

    I wouldn’t know

    What to call something that lives

    In the spaces

    Between your words

    Between your pauses

    And what you take back

    I feel it

    In the way

    You look at me

    Like you see me

    And then

    Like you remember

    You shouldn’t

    I do not reach

    Not because

    I don’t want to

    But because I understand

    Some things

    Are not meant

    To be held

    Only Felt

    So I stay

    In the quiet

    You leave behind

    In the space

    That is never empty

    Just unclaimed

    And I watch

    How you return

    Without arriving

    How you stay

    Without staying

    And still

    Something in me

    Moves toward you

    Without moving at all

    And somehow

    That is enough

    Like reflections on water shimmering

    Just out of reach

    Something I can see

    But never gather

    Something that exist

    As long as I don’t try

    To make it mine

    And still

    I stand here

    Letting it touch me

    Learning the shape of a feeling

    That asks for nothing

    And gives everything

    Quietly

    Without promise

    Without future

    Without a name

    Just this

    And me

    Standing in it

    Until it fades

    Like the end of a day

    Soft

    Certain

    And gone

  • Within

    There is no space

    Between us

    My respiration

    Zigzags

    Every breath

    Your bed takes

    In this capacity

    Blood – blazes

    Knowing

    I’ve been burned

    Many times before

    But with you

    I am less contained

    The suddenness

    Of your hands

    Intertwined with mine

    Fails – to open

    While our shadows

    Become identical

    In a synchronous rhyme

  • Outsider

    Took my first steps

    On this corridor

    Unleveled earthiness

    Saw myself reflected

    In a rush of energy

    Becoming self aware

    That I had just met my soul

    It kissed my forehead

    From birth to forever

    With only God in between

    Punctually swallowing

    All of my blues

    With such artistry

    That when I glance at my children

    I do it

    With eyes closed

    Because I too

    Saw my life

    Pointing back at me

    Ciudad Habana, Cuba

  • Dear me:

    SUN: Sit and Listen

    “I stride to be

    More useful than your words

    In my absence

    Loneliness comes

    Are you still afraid of the dark

    You connoisseur of light

    Join me, let’s take

    A snapshot of God

    Air here is eternity

    Inexplicable gravitation

    Because here you don’t need a pen”

  • Veracity

    Truth

    Without mercy

    Has no sound

    It lives

    With circumstance

    In this exactitude

    I softly land

    And I like it

    Adds warmth

    To my being

    Coldness here

    Does not exist

    I am free

    As you startle

    All of my senses

  • Some . .

    Thoughts

    And

    Its dispersiveness

    Establish

    No boundaries

    In me

    Some, go on paper

    Some, sit on high grass

    Delighted and pure

    Some, say your name

    Thirsty and untuned

    Some, become satisfied

    As nude to touch

    Some, survive in a sphincter

    Regulated and relaxed

    Some, become butterflies

    Hoping to awake like someone else

    Some, stand in old age

    Identical to yesterdays

    Some, close their eyes

    As briefness outlines their fate

    Some, become trees

    Scattered in time

    Some, multiply when it rains

    Measuring drops as faith

    Some, exist in you

    More secretly and afraid

    Some, in darkness

    Half lit decades

    Of a young self

    Some, become some

    As all of these thoughts

    Can only be shared

    With

    Who reads me

  • If . .

    I ask you

    Point me to God

    And you point

    To the sun

    You have missed

    The point – entirely

  • Arrows & Metaphors

    Nothing has been spoken

    Yet – it is loud

    These feelings

    Exist in a poem

    Ink, and its elegance

    Place arrows

    On the palm of my hands

    Metaphors that rise

    With every consonant

    A corresponding rhyme

    That illustrates and loves

  • Viability

    Gestational verbs

    Is what we have

    You measure love in weeks

    While I hover

    Like an aerialist

    Over your skin

    This equilibrium

    Has turned sentences to lust

    Leaving – me – ropeless

  • Dopamine

    In this ballet of anesthetics

    The bravery of your words

    Interrogates my soul

    Exacting – for sure

    As braille to fingertips

    Tracing paradoxes

    Grammatically intoxicating – you

  • Half Dark

    Half bright

    This in between

    Keeps me awake

    As if all I ever wanted

    Suddenly – was

    No longer distant

    Safe space to rest my head

    A parenthesis made of rain

    Irreducible amounts

    In this immensity

    Impossible

    Becomes possible

    Exquisitely

    Like a rising sun

    And it’s imperialcy

  • Mathematics

    Poetry speaks to me

    In a language

    Made of bells

    It engulfs me

    In hues of pink

    Making shadows of myself

    Thousands and thousands of times

    In this totality

    I find you

    Over and over again

    Because it is you

    I want

  • Hábitat

    Night winds

    Startles my roof

    Such a ripeness

    In season

    Generations of birds

    Tucked between branches

    Feels like

    I am – in

    Nineteen eighty five

    Everyone was home

  • Tactile Nature

    Faithful you

    Noiselessly

    I have left you

    -Underwood

  • Strangers

    There is familiarity

    In your words

    Much like a beating heart

    Its synchronicities

    Valves, through me

    So graciously

    These events

    Over everything

    Feels chronic

    How do . . I

    Reach out

    Without these metaphors

    Perhaps

    You already know

    And smiling

    From a distance

    Nodding to this energy

  • March 14

    I have been

    A fire

    A cornerstone

    Inside your mind

    Easier to cry

    When you’re not around

    Because, loving you

    Requieres a soft space

    On the opposite side of my bed

  • rəˈzôlv

    You asked

    If I ever sleep

    I – do

    My mind circles

    In – rəˈzôlv

    This dazzling dark

    And its allegories

    Live above these lines

    You watch me

    And my insufficiencies

    When it comes to love

    And that is okay

    Because without it

    I would not be

    Myself

  • Utmost love

    Does God have a voice

    Does it speak in flowers

    Must be magical

    In a desire no less luminance’d

    Than a birthing womb

    A miraculous fortress

    With no sounds or wounds

    Resolute and most bright

    -Motherhood

  • To my sons

    When I struggle

    With your absence

    You call me

    My stomach beats

    A thousand marches

    Aches to be so many miles away

    If I had no sight

    I could find you both

    In the greatest of multitudes

    This haptic perception

    Reminds me

    That light

    Is sufficient

    If you dare to see it

  • Out’loud

    You come to me

    With hands

    Made of rain

    Annunciatively

    Whispering my name

    In this adverbial space

    I become

    Ever so nervous

    Forever’ly

    I swear

  • Ode to us

    We’re not alike

    I am – paused

    You – straight’shooter

    Fracturing the curvature of my spine

    If you’re going to love me

    Love me – well

    Victoring these days

    That feel like nights

    Resurrected

    By one giant sky

  • For me

    Mirrors are like mouths

    In this anarchy of metaphors

    I thrive

    If you’re reading this

    Every ounce of truth

    Lives from left to right

    Like a vowel beehived in eternity

  • Insoluble

    Sometimes

    Brightness

    Feels

    Disfigured

    Shinning

    So innocently

    While I stand

    In what feels like salt water

    Sulfured, perhaps

    Honed by your touch

    Skeptical, by your embrace

    Because in this clarity

    I’ve figured out

    You’re just wrong

    For me

  • SIN-tuh-lay-ting

    The air feels golden

    Immaculate matter

    High enough

    For birds to fly

    Flickering flight

    Minimal effort

    With every rise

    I have

    Loved

    You

    Here

    – Scintillating

  • Fevered

    One word at a time

    Spoken in the dark

    Points with wit

    Incendiary like us

    And in this night’gold

    Love reveals in verse

    Divided where sun is most

    Exigently, my love

  • Hemostasis

    Doors between us

    You tell me

    Be careful with my head

    These ambitious thoughts

    Must hide them

    Like contraband

    In this reverent space

    I greet you

    Making myself

    An immediate cautery

    Instead of shaking your hand

  • Levity

    Today feels loud

    Soundless energy

    Birds stopped singing

    As if they know

    Something we don’t

    You tell me

    I won’t be alone

    Note how rooted

    This situation feels

    It hurts like hell

    Drowning in puddles

    When you promised

    You’d always keep me afloat

  • Les’soi

    My skull

    A spy

    Must admit

    That tomorrow

    I will do this again

    It has power over me

    Like war itself

    In this patriotism

    Of self reflection

    I am lucky enough

    To have a glimpse

    Of my heart

    Its two hands, grasping

    What feels like love

  • Catalina

    The day my mother married

    Hers, weeped

    Futurity of leaving Cuba, gone

    She grieved her only child

    All efforts to bring her home, futile

    Through the years

    And under a fleet of angels

    I saw myself

    Reflected in her

    Superbly waiting for motherhood

    Incessant fire, love that burns

    Like a tower, in me

  • Distance•r

    I see • you

    Bringing rain

    To my hands

    Like a plant • waits

    To become • a tree

    Who am • I

    To • you

    In this whole earth

    Equating love

    For leaves

  • Thistle of a verb

    You

    Seek me

    Like a myth

    Your hands

    Fallen stars

    Made up of punctuations

    Leaving me

    Speechless

    With no reason

    To wait

    In this

    Inflectional morpheme

    You call, love

  • e·pit·o·mize

    I am

    Foolishly

    Fragranced

    By the way

    You made me feel

    Sir, you leaned

    Bursting open

    All my wounds

    It must’ve been

    Your wisdom

    With women, like me

    Mounted on brows of men, like you

    Epitomizing, secrets over strength

  • Cover of a poem . .

    Familiarity

    And wants

    In this existence

    Just, lives here

    Digitally tucked

    In a forever

    In this valiancy

    And under

    An extremest sun

    I squint

    Seeking

    God’s own words

    Instead of my own

    How wondrous of me

    Desiring to be

    No less than

    A cover of a poem

  • Entanglement

    As much as I

    Perceive the future

    Its architecture

    Comes to me

    Most purest, splendid

    Comparable to a womb

    Shining down

    From heaven

    But in this present

    I witness

    And swear

    Our brevity

    Is a rigorous rhodium

    Uttering love

  • Tauromachy

    God made you

    Out of a clay

    One granule

    After another

    Exquisite

    Reversed

    Intelligence

    It is possible

    We loved

    While strolling

    Upside down

    Indeed, we have

    I have observed you

    Light suited saluting

    A formidable crest

    Please, hush now

    Here comes silence

    In this bright applause

    -Man

  • When I can’t sleep . .

    I think of color

    Conte technique

    Over this pillow

    I shade pebbles

    Greater than your hands

    Scattering through debris of seeds

    In a place with so few trees

    Hearing your echo intertwined with mine

    What is ‘this’ passion

    If you can’t meet me halfway

    Sometimes

    You feel like a void

    That I follow

    Without following you

    A portraiture

    The tonality

    Of a single text

  • Instant

    You make my flame slow

    It’s not what I give that smokes

    To draw what we both can’t kill

    In this mackerel atmosphere

    I love you

    Down tidily

    Waist deep

    Men like you

    More absolute

    A general liberty to sting

  • Realities

    My dad would always tell me, repeatedly.

    ‘You don’t pick the wrong men, they pick you’

    This always resonates when finding myself in that sort of situation.

    I’m quite imperfect couldn’t keep a marriage, not for lack of trying.

    Tried to give my sons the illusion of balance. That didn’t last, it was soul crushing.

    My sons are now grown men, and have a clear understanding of my side of the story.

    Yes, there are two sides.

    A high percentage of women leave – to live – not to be with someone else.

    I’ve lived, loved, and raised two men.

    Empty nest, feels loud.

    Their happiness and relationships, validates all efforts.

  • Personal

    My first ink experience was 26 years ago.

    Will never forget my parent’s faces, over a tiny butterfly on ankle.

    Dad would say ‘do you want to be a walking newspaper’

    After 18 months of metastatic cancer and home hospice he parted to a dimension of familiarity, lush greenery filling his lungs with oxygen.

    I grieved, and edited every square inch of my arm, as my mental health spiraled.

    At times I regret the crowdedness of colors.

    A tabloid – I suppose.

  • Incandescent

    familial • ashes

    surrounding its coast

    superb • is to forget

    because •

    in this • geology

    anonymity is defeated

    by flamboyant royals

    their vast sweeping branches

    its flowering habit

    embracing an entire island

    that has lost all hope

    – Cuba 2026

  • Vocal

    At dusk

    I become

    Part of him

    Quietly placing

    Dishes in suitcases

    Light yellow

    Leather tones

    Such a sense of grief

    When you cover my eyes

    And show me

    The inside of your world

    Fresh footed staircase

    Spiraling sideways

    Onto the longest corridor

    Linear shadows

    Of a once lived home

    I am not indifferent

    To your pain

  • I have observed

    How delicately you swallow

    Swear this is true

    The air in this room

    Becomes a yes

    For I have no reason to say no

    Were flesh was involved

  • Hero

    The fire you create

    Keeps me up at night

    Suspended, perhaps

    In this tonality

    My soul, alone

    Fears reciprocity

    I am a – faithfullest

    We can’t be friends

    Intimacy too lit

    Feels like an infidel

    In this physiology

    I am no longer

    The protagonist

    It’s you, your heart

    It’s pulsing valves

    Such regurgitation

    For a man, like you

  • My mind. .

    Dilutes memories

    Like light, steadfast

    And sufficient

    When I dare to see

    I ache in a dwelling

    That’s too proud

    For love . .

  • What about us

    Lustful is unlikely

    Traces of your skin

    Lingers my hands

    We have flown

    In this structural paradise

    Seeking light

    Out of storms

  • Line _ drawn in me

  • Everyday

    i pass by

    the oldest

    mountain

    denying

    every stain

    of rain

    i should have resolved

    the tactics of my faith

  • Ellipse

    I feel safe

    In his space

    It’s hiving here

    Buzzing latitudes

    Bewildered, by

    His skilled heart

    Endless design

    Circling me

    Like an ellipse

    In this parameter

    We make a little house

    Overburdened with joy

  • Outgrown

    you

    sold

    small

    amounts

    of myself

    because, i

    deliberately

    unloved, you

  • With you

    Splendor

    And truth, alone

    Rings more in me

    My thighs become

    Weak, invisible

    And with this wonder

    Spring soars in me

  • Untitled

    Love

    If fire is water

    You are

    A diaphanous drop

  • Ether

    Ether

    Truth

    Has

    No

    Season

    When

    It

    Comes

    To

    Us

    Sir

    How

    Do

    You

    Sleep

    Without me

    Our chemistry

    In this velocity

    Like ether

    Over me

  • Dark Bright

    Lover you

    Over my brow

    Can I touch you

    In this firmament