and look how the clay gets under the nails, I mean
really packed into the beds, the red, stubborn earth
of an old entitlement I carried around the yard
like a sledgehammer, and isn’t it something
how sour the soil turns when you’re the one
who drove the roots dead, how you have to kneel down
in the gravel in the middle of your life, right there in the hot,
unforgiving sun, and stop calling the garden you trampled a sanctuary
to finally sit on the overturned bucket in the dirt
and say to the person across from you, i was cruel, i was trained to conquer,
and i brought the poison into this ground with my own two hands
oh, the godawful, sweating labor of taking the thing you were taught to be
by its scruff, hauling the rusted pickaxe out into the brush
after half a lifetime of taking up all the air in the yard,
when everyone else built like you has settled for the slow rot of being right,
to hack down into the overgrown thorns of who you used to be, reaching
for the venom you buried under the fence line,
and dragging it out into the light, unwashed, bruised
to stand there in the body you fought half a lifetime to inhabit,
in this soft, newly soft skin that spent decades learning how to dominate,
and realize that dropping the heavy tools doesn’t grant you automatic grace,
it means unlearning the old instinct to flatten whatever stands in your way
it means weeping into the sleeves of a work dress you waited years to wear,
while you scrub the black grease of old authority off your knuckles,
wiping the dirt off a terrible truth on your denim thigh, holding it out
in an open, trembling palm like a stone you finally stopped throwing
saying here, look at what i did, look at the brutal machinery i am still digging out
from under my own ribs, and letting the raw, stinging juice of the crushed earth
run straight down your arm, not defending it, not hiding behind your history,
just standing in the open field of your own mistakes, bare-chested and small,
learning how to give up the throne so you can finally learn how to love
—lyra moon (writing this with dirt still under the fingernails)
July 29, 2026