Today's poem is by Amy Small-McKinney

Love/Furious
       

Not so cold that I want to stay indoors.
Instead, that vacancy between fall and winter.

The sidewalk here is crooked, broken,
entire slices of cement missing.

To walk, it is best to look down.

I remember when I fell, my finger broken,
my palm thickened with tangled branches
that forced two fingers to bend as if looking away.

Since he has died, I have awakened to a body    broken
more damaged than I knew.

The bones of my legs creak like floorboards. I can't find
the body I knew before wipes, pills, the save him, save him.

I didn't hear my body ask me to look up, look
at my mouth opposing itself, one side in a perpetual frown,
the other still stupidly smiling.

Why was the left side of my face shutting down?
My eye closing, its lid covering half of the pupil.
I did not see it.

Or is this the divide between seasons, a caregiver's sleepwalk, the I am and I can't?

I didn't hear my body ask me to look down, notice
the purple bruise on my calf, notice
the heavy wood bedframe I walked into.

I must have been helping him tie his shoes or button his shirt
or hanging on while he tried to stand.

Or is this the divide:    loving/furious?    afraid/furious?

I wanted to pour myself into his spaces.
I wanted to break from him like a rib.

How many selves fit into love's nesting?

Or is this a lie? Or rather, not the same truth for the woman, the I
now sitting by the file cabinet sorting through history,
deciding what to shred, what to save.

She listens to voice mail, I listen to his voice, over and over.

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Copyright © 2023 Amy Small-McKinney All rights reserved
from One Day I Am A Field
Glass Lyre Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission