Stage two-professional English student. Feminist. Writer. Casual singer. Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman fan. Non-career poet. Lover. Big eater.
There are certain points in the year when your heart stops.
These times are quiet,
And as a flicker behind your lashes,
I can see the broken parts of something
tiny and delicate—a shell,
or the snapped links of a silver necklace.
These time, instead of speaking, you are silent
but allow me to witness,
not entirely without the fear of voyeurism,
the specter of you as a child, bent over these pieces
trying with new fingers to make them rejoin.
When I speak to you, what leaves my mouth
is more sound than language.
If neither of us recalls the individual syllables,
it is my way of offering an extra, spectral hand.
Hesitant, I am afraid
that mine is not as strong as yours,
nor ultimately will it reach the circumference of the image.
The gift, then, is the aching millimetric stretch
of muscle, bone and tissue
through which I might offer to cover you both.
