Wrightings

Skin remembers fire long after the flame is gone. What once was pliant, breathing, now cools into something altered clear, tight, fragile as art hung in a window no one dusts. The body learns a new language: pull, burn, white hush of silence. Nerves whisper alarms the mouth grows tired of translating. Pain becomes a season with no agreed-upon name. Doctors speak in diagrams, in careful gloves and brighter lights. I nod, polite, while my body leans away from itself, as if distance might soften what has already fused. There is grief here not loud, not cinematic but a thin mourning for ease, for touch without calculation, for the simple mercy of not thinking about skin. Yet fused glass still catches light. It bends sun into color, holds warmth longer than expected. Even changed, it is not ruined. Even scarred, it is still a surface the world moves through. I learn to tend myself like a careful artist: slow heat, patient cooling, respect for new limits. Not restoration but survival shaped ...

  My name is Joy—four days past Christmas born, Too late for hymns, too soon for grace of morn. I brought no warmth, no candle to the cold, No miracle of the season had been foretold. The heart I house is clouded, thick with night, A grief that dulls all color, sound, and light. Depression sits where healing should have grown, A rot unnamed, untreated, overthrown. Take care with names—those wishes etched in skin, Those crowns of promise pressed on infants’ sin. Had I been Lynn, or Sue, some neutral sound, No debt of cheer would track me all around. Who knows what truths my mouth might dare release, What darker thoughts might surface without peace? What I might be if not required to glow, To counterfeit a joy I’ll never know. I never loved my name, yet it is clean— Not half a prayer, not prophecy unseen. Not Hope, half-promised, dangling in the air, Nor Destiny, too bold to be unfair. Nor weighted like the names that openly Confess their grief—Mara, Lament, p...

Ruby Tuesday saved Christmas! At 2 AM  on Christmas morn we thought we heard Santa’s horn  but instead Ruby Tuesday called alarm was water spraying causing harm   Gallons rushed through ceiling above   From an apartment, empty and unloved  Two neighbors joined us in the fight  To find the shut off and save the night  By  5 AM  was back to bed  So camping we go and home we fled.

  There are only two, one left, one right. There used to be four and often more— you didn't use the closet as I wished. Those shoes so big I often tripped over them.   Heavy, clunky, metal braces under the arch. You had to take them off every time we passed through an airport, even before the shoe bomber.   I tripped over them once when you weren't home, and I took one to throw out of anger but couldn't—   I feared the damage it might do.   Then I considered the damage it might have done, not on a neck but on a back during a raid, you with gun drawn, directing someone not to move, put his hands behind his back.   Those shoes you wore in the uniform, I respected but feared, because you might not come home. Kevlar vests don't fit women well.   Unlike those shoes that brought you back until you decided it was time to leave— shoes no longer block my doorstep, no longer trip me in the dark.   This poe...

  The time draws near for the Harbor Bridge to leave us. I remember those who trembled at her height on a restless, windy night, and those who ran their proud race across her silver span. No longer will she cradle our passage to North Beach or crown our city’s shining view. Oh, Harbor Bridge, we adore you and all the steadfast ships you welcomed through yet bigger and better, they say, has come to rescue the day for our shipping economy and the desalination of our sea. We will hold your memory in photographs, in sunlit paintings of our Sparkling City by the Sea.

  Breath is like wind It can damage but not repair