There is a moment when the altar cracks and you see
not a god but a person: unkempt, ordinary, impossibly flawed.
And still you sit. And still you stay.
You think: Give this soul a cup of coffee
I have loved you in your smallness,
in your terror of being wrong,
in the way you arrive early because time
is a beast you cannot stop hunting.
I have seen the continents you keep locked,
marked with warnings I was never meant to read,
and I have pressed my mouth to those borders anyway,
whispering: let me in, let me in, let me in
but when the door opened
I didn’t want to come in anymore.
These are the small deaths we die in the process of really seeing someone.
And they are magnificent.
There is something holy about loving someone
after you have beheld their strangeness
never the ghost of who they could become,
but the creature who stands before you now,
rocky soil, hair in shower drain and all.
One learns to grow pines where tulips refuse to take.
Everyone is impossible to live with sometimes,
including me. While it may seem,
it’s not a flaw in the design,
but the design itself.
The most subversive thing I have ever done is stay.
Love that endures does not arrive as
fireworks or butterflies or storm.
It arrives as peaceful snow,
Silently piling snowflake over snowflake
Until you now have hours of shoveling
just to get back into the world.
Or as someone who has witnessed me weep
at documentaries and pretends I’m not a
fucking mess when the penguin’s egg die.
I cannot live without you is terror dressed as devotion,
a fist where a hand ought to be.
I have learned to live with you.
I keep choosing to.
And should you need to go,
I shall not make a cage of
what was meant to be a garden.
I love the gardening more than the keeping.
That’s all from me, your turn to ask what if.
Thank you for reading my work! Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself! I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and dystopias when I’m paying attention.
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I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.
You can buy my book on Amazon.
Exquisite.
I love the comparison to cage and garden as if offering the continuation of growth, giving those we love room to breath instead of smothering them
The poem comes across genuinely and this line especially stuck out:
“I cannot live without you is terror dressed as devotion”