There is an antique blueprint that stays with me:
a wild horse standing in the blue timothy grass,
uncaught, the perimeter fully cleared of teeth,
and yet her ears remain pinned like two iron
pocket knives clipping the wind. You cannot
coax the electricity out of a creature like that.
She was raised in a room where the door was
always slamming. The clearing is empty now,
the sky a spotless sheet of glass, but memory
is a stubborn historian, still hoarding smoke.
She may never completely unlatch her jaw –
never stop searching for shadows in corners.
But this morning, those hooves give way to
damp clover. She drops her heavy skull into
a patch of weeds. Meanwhile, the forest still
keeps its claws, of course, but the warm dirt
has worn this same green coat long enough
for her body to recognize the stitch.

I made a habit of the quarry, hauling
limestone up into my chest like an extra set
of ribs, a fence so tight that the white clover
choked on its own sweet milk. I was
a padlocked acre – a sheer drop of salt-cliff
where the water breaks & learns to
turn back. Then, you. You bypassed
the landslides, the conquerors with flags
to plant in my chest. No trumpets,
no heavy boots. Under your palms,
the stubborn granite of my posture thinned
to vellum, creasing into the sharp wingspan
of a paper crane. Now, the morning air is
a bright, unpardonable blade. I am standing
in the wreckage of my own long silence,
holding my pride’s folded origami like
a useless artifact. I have become terrifyingly
legible. But look at the blue thrumming in
the hollow of your wrist. Look at my
smallest finger moving toward yours,
leaving the safety of the ruins, reaching into
the open. Down where the bone meets the
pulse, where the blood is doing its radical,
tender work of choosing to stay.