Category: Poetry

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

the afternoon light curdles over a house built out of dried river mud
and on the porch an iron stove sits cold, its door chained shut from the outside
inside the oven, three porcelain teacups are filled to the brim with wet ash
waiting for a visitor whose feet have turned to stone at the bottom of the lane
down in the dry well behind the barn, a brass pendulum swings without an engine
scraping a groove into the damp clay wall, deeper with every passing minute
holding onto a time that finished years ago, forcing the house into a slow, deliberate lean

at five o’clock a dry wind comes down from the hills carrying the smell of copper
and the pendulum strikes the side of the well with the sound of a cracked bell
in the orchard, three dead apple trees drop all their bark at once
exposing pale white wood beneath, carved with lines like the palms of human hands
a rusted iron plow standing in the weeds begins to sweat red rust in the heat
its heavy blade sinking an inch deeper into the parched dirt, stubborn in its waiting
bleeding onto the threshold of a field that will never see another harvest

at the edge of the tree line a feral dog pauses in the briars
its ribs showing sharp and clear beneath a dull coat
it sniffs the stale breeze for the scent of salt or grease
then turns back into the shade of the deep woods without making a sound
knowing there is no dish waiting on any back porch
no hand coming out to stroke the fur behind its ears
only the long endless search for water in a dry creek bed
and the quiet acceptance of an empty horizon

by dusk the pendulum snaps under the weight of what it refused to drop
and instantly the kitchen earth splits open from end to end
a heavy column of white salt rises up through the dirt like a pale tree
shattering the teacups in the stove and lifting the tin roof toward the stars
the walls of the mud house collapse inward under their own heavy memory
leaving only the column of salt standing tall where the stove used to be
while out in the woods, the dog keeps walking through the dark
leaving the dead fields to dissolve into the quiet earth that birthed them

—lyra moon (some places were never meant to be inherited, only outlived)
July 31, 2026

i stood in the parking lot behind the pharmacy holding a paper bag full of tiny blue pills
because someone on the internet said wait under the blue awning until 3
i got there at 2:54 and smoothed the front of my skirt
i made my spine very straight like a flagpole trying to belong to the sky
i kept checking my shadow on the asphalt to see if it looked like a girl yet
or if it was still wearing the heavy coat of the boy i had to unmake to get here

a security guard in a dark uniform was eating a cold sandwich on the curb
he was not waiting for a miracle he was just getting paid by the hour to watch the glass
i asked him if he ever felt like his own body was a room he’d been locked inside of
and he chewed his bread and said miss I just make sure nobody breaks the locks
he called me miss without looking up without checking the edges of my chin
and my lungs caught on fire because nobody had ever named me correctly out in the open light before

the person with the brown envelope never came and the sun began to go down cold
i stood there until my knees were shaking from the wind and the terrible weight of being perceived
when his shift ended the guard threw his wax paper into the trash
he looked at my bare legs shivering in the gravel and said
i am going to the diner down the street to get a bowl of split pea soup if you want to walk with me

so i walked half a step behind him through 3 dark blocks of barking dogs
wondering how many years i spent treating every stranger like an executioner
we sat in a corner booth with cracked red plastic that smelled like old coffee and bleach
we ate hot french fries with too much salt and drank water from sweating plastic cups
he didn’t ask why my driver’s license had a picture of a dead boy on it
he didn’t ask me to defend my right to exist at his table

and when the waitress brought the check she set it down between us and smiled
and the guard paid for both of us with 2 crumpled 20 dollar bills from his pocket
he looked at me across the table with eyes that were soft and tired and entirely kind
and he said you made it through the day kid, you get to keep going
and i put my face into my hands right there in front of the pie display and wept
because i spent 30 years believing grace was something you had to earn or beg for
and it turns out salvation is just a stranger buying you dinner and letting you be a living girl

—lyra moon (written where the ice thaws just enough to hold a footprint)
July 30, 2026

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

water knows how to shape a stone without breaking it

we gather the gray silt in our palms
learn to name what survives the current

a small mammal twitches in the high grass
watching the light turn from amber to cold slate

there is an art to standing still inside your own skin
until the forest forgets you are a visitor

you don’t need to tear down the walls
to let the wind through the threshold

only open the back door
let the wild grass grow up through the hallway

a seed takes its own time to remember
how to become a tree

—lyra moon (learning the shape of the timber)
July 27, 2026

i painted my eyelids the shade of a small bird that broke itself against the glass
i dusted the cold wrists that hold me at night
with the scent of blossoms opening only in vacant places
i carried my fragile assembled self into a storm of noise
where a thousand throats were screaming a single word
until the word was stripped of its skin
they floated around me like angels spun from neon salt
possessing a secret i spent three aching hours before the glass trying to learn
i tried to hand a stranger a sliver of my voice
just a quiet thread so i wouldn’t dissolve into the air
and they recoiled as though i were begging for something ruined
i asked the water for a glass of water
and the ice cubes just kept dancing in the dark
so i sank my gaze into the glowing blue square of my hands
and waited for a name to fall like sudden rain across a desert
i left before my dress even realized we were inside

—lyra moon (a lighthouse built entirely out of mirrors)
july 25, 2026