Month: August 2026

i’m building a small fire in my own palm
and asking everyone why they’re running from the smoke
i tell myself the burn’s just proof that i can still feel warmth
that if i turn my flesh into ash
there’ll finally be nothing left for them to break

the voices in my head are wearing the faces of people i loved
they’re standing in a ring around me
telling me that my hands have always been too heavy to hold
and maybe they’re right
maybe my body’s just a house made of bad timber
meant to collapse under the weight of its own roof

i want to open my chest and hand you the jagged pieces
to show you how much it hurts to stay inside this skin
i want to run until my knees give out
until the night swallowing me feels kinder than waking up tomorrow
i’m so tired of fighting the person in the mirror
so tired of begging my own heart to keep beating when all it wants is peace

please don’t look away from me while i’m unraveling
i’m not trying to ruin everything i touch
i’m just a child lost in a room with no light
holding a match and waiting for someone to come save me from the dark

learning to live means dropping the embers before they consume you
it means letting the morning light arrive without asking if you earned it
your lungs don’t need a reason to keep reaching for air
and your hands were made for gentle things, starting with yourself

—lyra moon (survival isn’t the reward for enduring the fire, it’s the refusal to become the spark)
august 6, 2026

it started as a cold rumor under your ribs
a tiny seed of winter taking root in the bone
and we pretended for months that the room wasn’t getting colder
that the tea wasn’t going sour on the bedside table

i watched the weight fall off your shoulders like loose soil
until you were only paper
until you were only skin stretched thin over a song
i couldn’t stop from fading

do you know what it is to hold a glass of water
and know it is the last glass of water
to watch a person swallow
and realize you are counting down the drops

there are no second chances left in the cupboard
no extra years tucked behind the books on the shelf
there is only the heavy rattle of your breath in the dark
and my fingers tangled in yours
trying to anchor a mountain with a piece of thread

stay
just until the bird outside finishes its note
just until the sun touches the edge of the blanket
you are slipping through my grip like dry sand
and the room is filling up with everything
i never got to say

i am sitting in the ruins of us
holding your cold wrist
and waiting for the house to fall down

—lyra moon (learning how to hold an ocean with a handful of dust)
august 4, 2026

when you told me you were tired
my brain panicked and built a fire
i mistook the heavy in your voice for an exit
and so i began to pack away every fragile piece of myself
promising to lock the doors and throw away the keys
before you even had the chance to leave

you asked for rest and i gave you a eulogy
i folded my excitement like a sharp clean knife
and buried it deep inside my chest where it could only cut me
i thought if i made myself invisible enough
if i apologized until my mouth was full of dust and gravel
i could somehow save us from the mess i made

i watch you try to carry your own exhaustion
while i keep handing you the leaden weight of my shame
i was so afraid of bruising you
that i made you stay awake in the dark
just to hold my hands and convince me
that i was still allowed to exist in your life

this morning my chest feels bruised from the inside out
i went into the warm yard and talked to the trees
i begged them to tell me how to stay rooted in the earth
without breaking every gentle thing i touch
i stood there crying into the quiet grass
wondering why my love always feels like a accident

i just wanted to build you a softer landing
i wanted to give you a place where the world couldn’t hurt you
and instead i made you bleed to keep me whole
i am so sorry for making my heart a burden you had to carry
when all you ever needed from me
was permission to close your eyes

—lyra moon (the tree doesn’t weep when the wind breaks its shade, it simply remembers how to grow where the sun still falls)
august 4, 2026

old macdonald sold his land to power the tech firm server hub
and on that land he had some stacks ai ai oh
with a mega watt here and a brownout there
here a turbine there a coal ash flare
old macdonald sold his land ai ai oh

data centers lithium pits seabed drills forever chemicals

twinkle twinkle little satellite star
how i wonder where the old growth forests are
up above the canopy so high
roadless rules erased as timber trucks roll by

pfas in the tap water cobalt in the battery coal back on the grid

humpty dumpty sat on a sea wall high
humpty dumpty watched the heatwaves fry
all the lobbyist firms and all the board room men
couldnt buy the missing songbirds back again

three billion birds gone 100 degree heat groundwater drained deregulated creek

baa baa black sheep have you any wool
yes sir yes sir three data banks full
one for the cloud drive one for the algorithms appetite
and none for the riverbed dried out overnight

old growth timber mineral rights carbon offset e waste

ring around the windfall profit
pockets full of toxic runoff
ashes ashes
the grid goes down

lyra moon (greedy jaw eats the river to feed the cloud)
august 3, 2026

tire tracks in wet gravel
beside the rusted dumpsters

a crow standing on a crushed paper cup
watching the morning come up gray over the lakefront works

here the asphalt holds everything
motor oil rainwater small scraps of foil

i remember walking this alley with my mother
when i was seven years old
she held my hand so tight her knuckles were white
we were looking for empty aluminum cans in the weeds
to trade for bus fare back to the room

she had a tear in the heel of her winter boot
and every three steps her foot would slip in the slush
but she never let go of me
she was singing an old country song under her breath
a melody with no words left in it

we found six cans behind the auto body shop
and she laughed like we had dug up gold
she wiped the dirt off my cheek with the corner of her sleeve
her skin smelled like lake wind and stale coffee
she told me we were going to make it all the way home

thirty years later i walk the same stretch of gravel alone
the auto shop is gone now replaced by a chain link fence
and a brand new condo rising six stories into the fog

my mother has been gone twelve winters
her winter boots buried under six feet of steel town earth

i sit down on the curb in the quiet damp air
and I press my bare palms against the cold wet concrete
i can still feel the exact shape of her thumb pressed into my wrist
holding me fast against the dark
holding me like I was the only light this city ever had

i am sitting in the dirt of the land she tried so hard to keep me safe on
and i am screaming her name into the exhaust of the morning traffic
and I am crying because she loved me enough to carry us both
and I am crying because the air is cold and i am still here
and i am still her daughter walking back to the room

—lyra moon (the seed remembers the hand that dug through the mud to plant it)
august 2, 2026