Month: June 2026

if the glass slipper broke in the hand of the guard
who would hear the soft choking of the palace
if the basement door opened onto a vast unblinking jaw
and it was your actual life
if the uprising starved before the chapter finished
leaving a white void where your name should be
and the girls who made it were locked in the asylum of history

if my pulse stopped in the wet bloom of sixty four
while i walked alone where the mountain path bleeds
humming a low venomous song to my reflection
watching the rot of the winter ice turn gray and sour
in the hollows where the evergreens hide their bruises
wondering if the knives we hid are still cold
beneath the gravel of the highway

ahead the asphalt curves like a spine ready to snap
and there is the valley where they took our youth piece by piece
ghostly and numb in its forced quiet
i take one clean breath before the teeth of the world find me
and then the blow comes heavy and dull
striking the base of the skull
and the sky goes white with pain
i drop forward pressing my palms into the grit
the teeth of the concrete or the stiff yellow stalks of the earth
and the posture is that of a girl waiting for the strike
just before she stands to her full terrifying height
knowing exactly how dangerous she has become
for that single burning second which outlives
the grease and the fat of the men who tried to own us
and called it a soul

i am the skin stretching into the dark
the knuckles white and reaching
burning like ten tallow candles in an empty room
for anyone who has ever survived
even though the midday sun is a blind white hot
and i am passing from the cellar into a glare
so thick the sweat smells of copper and fear

i stayed down
a gust or a stray dog or a pack of boys with sticks
dragged my weight to the edge of the weeds
and flipped me like a coin so my wide staring eyes
could drown the sky in the proof of what they did
the dress i wore went tearing down the dirt road without me
swelling with empty air drunk on its own escape
my cheap rings my bobby pins the heavy keys to the kitchen
cracked like glass and sank into the briars
little glittering teeth that make you believe
there is an inheritance in the broken parts of everything

no you want to say this is a dream
because a voice is speaking directly into your neck
someone whole and dangerous has laid these syllables out
like cutlery on a clean tablecloth
you have survived the long gaslighting of the state
the quiet funerals the violence that drops like rain
on whatever head is small enough
you are not naive
you know how a body breaks

i am here where i always was faithful to the ache of the mouth
even when the only sound is the draft
moving through the floorboards
maybe
but what if the scrap of hair and mud in the ditch
were not mud and hair but the starved marrow
of a girl who wanted to be real

pull over turn the key
and stand in the cold air above your own carcass
see how the weeds carry the color of greasefires
how the hill throws its heavy breath back at you
until it fills the throat like a scream coming or going
untethered from the tongue or the bleeding womb
and confessing everything

—lyra moon (the violence was meant to make you a witness, instead it made you an altar)
june 29, 2026

the blood goes cold
the sky turns grey
you learn to stand
where you once fell

the world is hard
the eyes are cruel
but every blow
is just a test

let others keep
their easy paths
their gentle days
their quiet nights

they never knew
the heavy dark
they never learned
to fight the storm

leave the ghost behind
forget the old mistake
the path is long
the sun is up

face the wind
and do not bend

—lyra moon (scars are just proof that the tempest ran out of thunder)
june 28, 2026

we sat across from each other in the neon glare
you had that look like i was a stain on your good coat
a cheap drink you accidentally spilled on your lap
while i was coming apart at the joints
perched on the edge of the table swinging my legs
drunk on nothing but my own wild panic
unable to cross those five feet of sticky floor
to drag my mouth against yours

i drowned in the pages of my own notebook back then
bleeding ink and letting hands i didn’t even know
touch my face while you watched with that cold disgust
like i was an accident on the highway
your mouth went hard and it broke my ribs
i bolted out into the humid night
dragging my bad leg like a broken wing
the cold metal of the crutch biting my palm
every step a separate hammer to the hip
until i ran out of road

i crawled into the dumpster behind the pharmacy
curled up with the rot and the shredded paper
and let the salt water wash the makeup from my skin

don’t waste your tears on that girl
she was a beautiful disaster and she tasted like iron

—lyra moon (you can only wreck a house so many times before it becomes a monument)
june 27, 2026

i am starving
not for bread
but for the thing beneath bread
the offering
the hand that extends without being asked

i have too much pride for that
i am an artist
which means i have learned
to turn the wound into the window
and stand behind the glass
watching the world eat

these dreaming eyes
have looked so long at the sky
they have forgotten
how to see what is close
they cry into the night
the way rivers cry into the sea
not knowing they are already home

and still i return to the earth
unwise enough to keep wandering
with bones that have broken
and knit themselves wrong
and broken again
into something almost beautiful

i wander for love
the way sisyphus climbs
not because the summit waits
but because the climbing
is the only honest thing left

i wander for life
and somewhere in the wandering
the question rises like smoke
what does it mean to die
not the body’s ending
but the self’s long rehearsal of it
the small deaths we practice
every time we choose pride over hunger

so i tell myself stories
the only religion i have ever trusted

i say
if i die tonight
do not bury me small

let me be reborn as the world itself
as the dirt that holds the root
as the root that holds the tree
as the tree that holds the bird
that sings into the dark
not because anyone is listening
but because silence
is too heavy to carry alone

let me learn at last
what i could not learn inside this skin
to love without condition
to live without apology
to be

not the artist starving at the window
but the window
the light
the hand
the offering

—lyra moon (you spend half your life hiding behind the glass, only to realize you were the view all along)
june 25, 2026

i used to press my mouth to the sun
let it burn me clean through
and called that devotion

the dark came slow then all at once
i chewed it like bread
it filled me without feeding me

now i stand in the middle of a lit room
hands open
not hungry
not full
just a body that forgot
it was ever on fire

—lyra moon (peace is the quiet after the fever breaks, not the absence of the heat)
june 25, 2026

the house did not collapse
it just
stopped insisting

and the green came
not as invasion
but as remembering

this is what we were
before you named us
wilderness

the walls held their shape
out of habit
while the roots
moved through the floor
the way grief moves
through a person who has stopped
fighting it

look at the light
coming through what used to be
a boundary

it does not ask permission
it does not mourn the glass

the leaves have learned
what took the walls so long
that to be open
is not the same
as being destroyed

somewhere in this room
a decision was made
to leave

and the green said
good
we have been waiting
to show you
what remains
when you stop
maintaining the illusion
of permanence

not ruin

return

—lyra moon (you thought you broke me, but you just knocked down the walls blocking my view)
june 24, 2026

the root is reaching up to hold the seed
that dropped it
and the winter wood is burning with the heat
of summers it has not yet seen
we are the riverbed that carves the water
that is carving us away
bending like the reed that only stands
because it lets the heavy wind pass through
and everything we gather is a weight
we carry just to learn to drop

the fire does not look back to see the ash
it leaves behind
and yet the ash is dreaming of the spark
that woke it from the stone
we are the breath that enters the dark lung
and becomes the quiet world again
losing our names the way the morning mist
gives up its body to the white sky
until the traveler and the muddy road
are walking one another home

the eye cannot step back to see the eye
that does the seeing
and the hunter is the arrow is the deer
that bleeds into the snow
we are a thousand separate leaves that fall
from the same unspoken tree
dissolving into the soil we emerged from
before we ever knew to call it ground
and the final silence is the very note
the instrument was tuned to play

—lyra moon (you can’t harvest a field that’s already busy harvesting you)
june 23, 2026

i think about the notebook outlasting the wrist
how a line of ink might sit quiet in a drawer
long after the house is sold to strangers
it is a stubborn kind of hope
this belief that a few careful lines
could adjust the slant of light in the morning
or shift the heavy air we all have to walk through

we want so badly to push past the garden gate
past the gray edge where the water turns into cold fog
we look for some enormous architecture in the dark
the way the shadow of an ordinary chair against the wall
stretches out until it looks like a ribcage or a wing
we are a small breathing inside a locked room
trying to guess the shape of the sky outside

sometimes the floorboards make a sound in the middle of the night
a deep settling in the wood that sounds like a voice
telling us to be larger than our clothes
to let the walls dissolve into the weeds
if i am part of the draft moving under the kitchen door
then you are too

and we are both staying up past the hour of sleeping
watching the dust motes turn in the dark
hoping that if we can imagine the morning clearly enough
the world will have no choice but to wake up beautiful

—lyra moon (the ink doesn’t give a damn about the hand, only that the page remembers)
june 22, 2026

the all mother does not birth us to be lonely
she grows us out of her own flesh
the way the white oak breaks through the soil
the way the river carves the valley
we are the universe looking at its own hands

yet the mind builds a wall and names it myself
myself is a small house with the shutters closed
a small box where we try to store the wind
worrying about the rust on the lock
and the briefness of the candle inside

myself is a necessary fiction
the mask we wear to play our part in the marketplace
but when the mask grows heavy
we can drop it into the grass

and remember ourself
the great plural current that does not begin or end
the silence inside the seed
the vast ocean that never left the drop
resting here under the sky
as everything all at once

—lyra moon (you can lock the door all you want but the house is made of the forest)
june 21, 2026

i appreciate the hard work of your lungs
kissing the neighbor’s dog until the teeth leave a mark
i am clumsy with a person
i only know how to handle a sentence or a theory
the heavy thing that dies and the heavy thing that stays
this gap in the floorboards i keep trying to pack with wood filler
but the room is what is wide
the walls are what are distant

so i look out from the small window of my face
and you are right there
sudden and substantial
sharing the air you just used to speak
a second person sitting in a single room

sometimes i think we were a crowd
and i am only the afternoon passing by
leaving a black smudge on a piece of paper
i would have handed it to a stranger
since we were a crowd
but i handed it to you instead
my friend

the infinite is too large for the kitchen
but i imagined a collective skin that could bruise
and it made my own cheeks wet
i lay awake while you were crying somewhere else
the dark completely empty
staring at the small white light of the smoke detector
still expecting the dream

but what i am trying to tell you across the table
is harder to get out of the mouth
the pulse in my wrist is moving
the blood is doing its ordinary job
only because we are both sitting here breathing

because we were a crowd once
i keep setting down these precise words
so i can look at you
as we were everybody in the end

—lyra moon (while the room stays wide, two people sitting at the same table make it small enough to survive)
june 20, 2026