will I ever learn to let go? / of agony calcified / pieces falling like white ash where I tread / revealing a heart’s first fissures / still black-and-blue enough to see through
‘you can’t hold onto this forever’
and if I let the words marked on me in anger scar? / if instead it could be like lovers carving a tree / fruit fallen and emanating so heady a scent / fermenting within second skin, vestigial
‘will you come visit?’
choose one to keep, with your other fragments / preserved under glass / this archaeology of a memory divided / which stretches on beneath time’s scattering haze
‘you sound just like him’
so I make cuts to match / ‘til everything you say scabs over / and when it forms a scar, we can do this again and again and
‘why is this still so difficult for you?’
I say nothing / though I’ve searched / tell me why I fear the night so / when I always await it with a child’s prescience / I used to come alive in low incandescence
‘dad left. I don’t know for how long’
all those years, peering through keyholes / listening for pitch between fixed points / in the Cimmerian shade of that ancestral grove / a luna moth nocturnal, seven and blue
‘go back upstairs’
attracted to the only light around for miles / even if it meant witnessing / to lie upon this, our altar of pacifism / a trio of lambs
‘have you two spoken?’
I have wrung the blood from my hair / stooping down to check keyholes all the same / if slower-paced, weary / at risk of letting go / from time to time
~~
Julia Greenshaw is a novelist and poet based in New England. Their work has been featured in The Canary Collective, Flesh and Parchment, and elsewhere. Their first novel, Knave of Sands, is out now. When not writing, they can often be found looking for mushrooms. They are on Instagram and Substack @juliagreenshaw.
