January
twelve:
This pair of combat boots feels steady sturdy strong for when the storm is internal, when January comes to call.
Voice lost in the dark snow, fingers buried in my hair,
I lace them up and stomped on his face when he asked me to do anything but go.
nineteen:
Mother’s father comes home and we help him
from the car, he will be
dead within a month and that silence echoes in our throats. His flesh melts into my shaking hands and his body tries to slip: legs and arms and terrified eyes and I am grasping to hold on. Who would decide to draw hearts like this: two halves and two teardrops ready to fall. Like asking for trouble, like hurtling down the track. The hospital shirt comes up and the sallow, marked skin shows through—I can see every vertebrae straining; hollow bird bones aching to fly, to be free, to leave all of this indignity behind.
thirty-one:
Maxwell is wearing
my father’s leather jacket from Oklahoma, and I think, it may
never have looked better.
He looks like someone you don’t want to mess with, but, maybe, I kinda do.
He is an ampersand, the way he write his bubbly symbols— the way he entwines himself in my life.
I lent the cold cowhide to his t-shirt-clad arms to his sweater-less soul, as the wind outside howled redemption at the foundation of my apartment, and I asked him, anyway, to stay.