after breaking

By Dean Bowman

glass again under the couch another sliver still bright from the night we broke it catches the light like it was still proud to have once been whole and i hold it between my fingers not to bleed this time but to remember what it was to build something fragile and remember how it felt to call it love and mean it and believe it not like hope or prayer but like soothing touch of skin on skin fingers interlocked eyes transfixed moving moaning melding together as one melting body heart soul slipping falling tumbling through the mattress into the cosmos

hurt moves the furniture in the room of memory topsy turvy when memory is violence masquerading as nostalgia when sleep-work-life pulls the eyes rubbernecking pain on past turnpikes life jacknifed no survivors but this piece this sliver it doesnt fade it doesnt lie it hums with what happened the silence the clash the wedding cup the fall the porcelain glass spray across the floor the hearts once one now two or six or sixty the shattering that sounded like forgiveness and wasnt and i wanted it to be forgiveness i wanted the breaking to mean something other than broken

some nights i sweep again though the floor has long been clean and i sweep the same corners where you stood where my voice went quiet the bristles know the path by heart now back and forth the friction the rumbling tumbling falling grief back and forth the bristles drenched in the constant replay the moment memory hurting healing cut scarred and i lose myself in the rhythm hidden gathering nothing but the feeling of making meaning from what cant be meant and sometimes the broom is all i have between me and the empty and the scar and the echo and sometimes its enough and sometimes

i keep the pieces in a jar by the window and sunlight hits it at dawn and the room fills with fractured rainbows like the kaleidoscoped monarchs i caught in third grade and kept in mother's Ball mason jar turned museum on the windowsill where their loving wings orange white black splintered the setting sun and it looks like hope or maybe just light or maybe theres no difference when the darkness never ends the kind that returns creepingly after a long freeze thaw winter after you thought nothing would return after you stopped looking

im learning to brush the past into neat dust bunnies neat sweet naive little corpses neat piles of something i can recognize something i can hold something i can carry something more than what was said what was meant what was lost i mash them squeeze them twist their fuzzy ears until the ache loosens fibers become strands become rope becomes bridge or maybe just thread just the thinnest line between then and now between who i was when you were here and who im learning to be in all this whatever this is

i dont know if healing is wholeness or if its just learning how to walk barefoot through broken memory without bleeding without screaming without wanting to grab back the words without wrapping rolling them in my tongue chewing churning chomping until i choke or stay in the moment before the world fell away or choose different choose us choose better choose anything choose nothing choose to never have met choose me

but the splinter still catches light even now even after and i let it sparkle i let the brightness happen i let the room fill with color i let myself stand here my new loving chrysalis wings emerging unfolding stretching and feel the breaking and the beauty all at once and maybe thats what it is holding both the hurt and the light the scar and the shine the way we were and the way i am now and the way i am now because of the way we were because who i am now only exists because of what we broke together and i dont know if thats grace or violence or both or neither or some arcane secret never to be found but now alone but still sweeping still standing still here

so i let it be

no more you

no more we

i let it all

just be

me

About The Author

Dean Bowman is a writer of poetry, essays, and autofiction. He writes from the fleeting margins of life. His work has appeared in Emerald City Ghosts, Poetry Quarterly, The Dark Veil, 50 Haikus, Inclement, and elsewhere.

The work ends here, but the listening doesn’t. At The Alchemist’s Cabin, poetry is gathered gently and shared with those willing to read slowly. If that’s you, you’ve already found your place.

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