where words abandon their bodies,
the hush gathers—
salt on the tongue,
thin light rising,
something unnamed moving between ribs.
what remains learns to breathe
in the collapsed lung of morning,
among the bones arranging themselves
like syllables longing for an altar.
what stays—
breathes.
It hums through the scar,
inhabits the silence left
by every love unraveled,
every fracture passed down,
every inheritance carried in marrow.
the fracture opens,
a mouth in the skin—
and what remains
keeps breathing through me,
quiet, patient, until
absence becomes kin.
I gather each remnant:
the light unhooked from its source,
the borrowed myth,
the memory of a body
breaking, reknitting;
until the poem itself
learns what the body
cannot teach—
how to breathe
beyond the leaving.
The Quiet Anatomy
Salt rests on the tongue. A ribcage stirs. Bones begin to arrange themselves in the shape of breath.
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