She was carved from thunderstorms.
And he, from wind.
When their hands first touched,
the marble should have cracked.

But her stone warmed beneath his fingertips.
And his surface softened where her palm pressed.

Of course I know you love me,
You didn’t have to stay.
But when I was at my worst,
You loved me anyway.

You held your arms out to me,
And said, “do what you will”,
But somewhere in the loving embrace,
You forgot that doctrine, still.

I have been so good at full.
The loud, flooding kind of full.
Somebody-want-me full,
spilling over just to prove without a shadow of a doubt,
That there was something in me worth spilling.

Your hands were the first thing I noticed about you.
They were calloused but still delicate,
with a tan that reminded me of a graham cracker crust.

Strong hands that could fix a fence post,
or make a damn good breakfast,
or break a heart.

Someone told me
they’d become good at making pancakes
as if mastery had quietly crept in
after years of early-morning battles.

And I could almost see them:
the pancake corpses,
scattered like pale moons across a kitchen floor.
Little doughy casualties of a person learning
how not to burn every beginning.

The tadpole was moving again.
It did not decide to move,
nor did it remember why it had started.
It simply felt the pull.
A restless, invisible thread unraveling inside its chest.

Begin with marble, untouched.
Not white, nor black, nor gray,
but the color of your earliest memory.

Start to chisel, not with a steely heart,
but with the breath of a newborn’s cry.
Soft, but piercing, so that it may shape the stone

My love was never a still thing.
It’s not positioned beneath glass,
with flaws frozen in time,
and gestures affixed to the frame.

The wings of my love are spread and speared,
but not for seeing flight,
nor mistaking stillness for closeness.

By chance we met, just once that year,
when he walked by me at dawn.
I met his glance, he flashed a smile,
But when I looked up, he was gone