No Stone Unturned
I leave no stone unturned, searching—
not from some tidy sense of duty,
but because the dark is curious,
and I am bored with daylight’s polite lies.
.
I rake my hands through earth that
knows my name and all of my secrets,
finding only old receipts, a broken button,
a coin with someone else’s face.
.
Each scrap becomes a question I answer with a fistful of soil, down deeper.
I dig past the seasons that promised more,
past the places I once thought I might live,
past the small, fossilized kindnesses I mistook for forever or, at least,
more than just one night.
.
"Love is everything" is chanted like a hymn
by those who haven't lost it yet,
but the cymbals clang hollow in my chest.
.
So I roll my eyes at altars and
fold my palms into pockets with holes.
I hide the most tender things in mason jars, high on the top shelf, where they can't hurt me
(...or I them...).
.
I label them someday and lose the key
as the hole grows wider, taking up space
like a secret garden no one visits,
a place of patient, polite ruin.
.
I sit in it sometimes, knees tucked,
listening for footsteps,
and pretending the world is a room
I can leave anytime I want,
but knowing, deep down,
I'm just as trapped as everyone else,
and leaving takes shoes I no longer own.
.
Sometimes I press my ear to the dirt and hear a different footstep calling out to me.
Small, uneven, but stubborn as a weed.
Persistent.
It pulls at some braided thread I thought I'd cut out from my psyche long ago...
.
Not salvation, not a trumpet, only a whisper:
you don’t have to understand every stone to keep breathing.
.
Still, I keep digging,
not for treasure but for practice.
Maybe just to learn the shape of
my own hands in the dark.
And if the world insists on meaning,
then I will barter with it:
give me a sentence, even a crooked one,
and I will accept it as gospel.
.
Not because I believe in meaning yet,
but because I can’t help loving the way the moon looks on wet dirt.