Too Much

The night will not cool

Its breath clings to my skin like regret

and I lie unmade

pressed beneath a ceiling too low for dreams

too near to thought

I am undone

by ordinary devastations

by the small violences of being passed over

unheard

unconsulted

in the places where I gave

everything I had

The world is burning

and still I answer emails

fold laundry

smile for guests

while my chest holds grief that isn’t even mine

but has made a home in me

A change came

swift as summer lightning

She who bore the weight with me

who saw the thing beneath the task

has been taken

not cruelly

not wholly

but in the quiet way that leaves you

dismantled

still expected to smile

I was not invited to the table

I was not even warned

The doors closed

and I remained

a figure in a house grown unfamiliar

dusting corners no one else notices

keeping the lamps lit for strangers

How polite I have been

How efficient

How careful with the wildness in me

taming it into bullet points and grace

But I am burning

Summer arrives like a punishment

Family gathers and I cannot

Joy demands a seat

but I cannot clear the space

My son circles

restless

while I rearrange calendars and carry water

that spills no matter how I hold it

The nightmares have come again

They wear new faces

but the same old eyes

They wait behind the lids

and whisper

none of this will hold

And my love

He is not here

but he is the echo that follows breath

the imagined press of hands

rising as I inhale

falling as I break

There is no reprieve

Only the thinnest kind of prayer

Let this grief be witnessed

Let this rage be named

Let the world know

I have not gone gently

into this late July

I am not composed

I am composition

written in cracked ink

scrawled in margins

smeared by heat and salt and

all the unsentences

I have swallowed to stay worthy

But tonight I write it

I am crushed

I am incandescent with longing

I am the ghost in the ledger

the woman at the window

the storm behind the lace curtain

Let no one call this melodrama

Let them call it truth

And if I weep

it is not weakness

It is ink

And I am writing

my way out