Hands

Working on a puzzle with Ana today.

Lying on my belly beside her,

I watch her nine-year-old fingers manipulate the pieces.

They are growing, her hands.

I can still see the three-year-old twirl in them,

the alphabet refrigerator magnets and bouncy curls,

but they are almost young woman hands now.

I want to remember them just as they are,

so I stare at the curves of her fingernails and the texture of her skin.

I admire her round cheeks, her bright eyes, her little chin.

I can still hold that chin between my thumb and pointer finger

like I used to.

She is growing

sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.

But as I lie here closely watching her

hands

there is no such thing as time.

IG: @daydreamifications

Broken

The poet said, “No one deserves to love something broken.”

Are we born fragment? solid beam of perfection?

or do we come splinter, splintered

searching for scraps to make us whole?

If so, catch me missing in distant places,

a part of a larger puzzle found.

Column coming together, re-bar making home,

drywall relationships, soft as bricks.

We make love instinctively 
to put the pieces back together.

We feel whole when we are so much 
more than just ourselves.

Connected is all we were ever meant to be.

Before our first breath birthed us ego, flooded us wants,

all we ever needed

was connection.

A dancer’s fingertip reaches out to an unknown something,

the second it coils back, snaps back to the middle—

we are that space in between.

We are the dancer’s reach to the heavens

and bent knee for mercy,

unable to do either without hip and spine and…

balance.

Place hands on womb, feel centered.

How nature intended—a delicately intricate web.

So effective, so beautiful in the sunlight, 
so resilient in the dark.

Meant to be as dirty as connections almost always are.

Never perfect, might bend with emotion or blur into the distance,

but will still always be…

here.

We so often measure pros and cons

tipping either side of the scale forgetting

we are the pillar holding the scales in place.

We are never truly barren until we give up on our connections

to others and to ourselves.
And if love were connection,

no shatter, no quake could break us no way.

I used to believe there was emptiness in being still,

but it has only been in stillness that have I learned to encompass

all things,

and there’s nothing empty about that.

The poet said, “No one deserves to love something broken.”

She led me to discover that when we feel
b - r - o - k - e - n
it is because we are loved to pieces.

We are loved.

IG: @daydreamifications