the colors bright red and baby blue

you used to sing blues songs to me when i’d cry into your sheets. i hear voodoo child playing now and i think of safe places, i think of your young face and when daddy had a beard. i think of the pink azaleas in bloom, our feet dangling off the porch and our eyes fading orange with the afternoon. i hear castles made of sand and i think of all the scars left still like quiet stars on the inside of your palms and how foggy your eyes could get sometimes. i see the pale shadows of what used to be freckles right beneath your lashes and i ache with this burning softness that tells me my home isn’t a place, it’s a person. you taught me things, quiet things, careful things, important things. you showed me how to paint with watercolors. you showed me how to catch dragonflies. taught me how to love a thunderstorm, read me books out loud and we’d whisper my favorite parts together.“second to the right,’ said peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.” i smell chicory coffee sometimes and i can almost see your cigarette in your left hand, i can hear my footsteps running down the hallway, i can feel the warmth of summer wrapping around me. you showed me how to listen. and that showed me how to love. you said once “we’re all broken baby. but you are more than these broken parts.” and you were right. i cried until the stars sunk into the light hiding behind the night, but you were right. i am soft and careening and nothing can stop me. this world cannot stop me. no one can stop me. because i know how to love a thunderstorm. and i can catch a dragonfly. because my mother taught me how to paint with watercolors. because i know how to listen. and i know how to love. and sometimes when i’m about to cry i start singing quietly to myself “and so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.” because we’re all broken but we are more than these broken parts.

and my skin will rot but my energy will not. my heart will stop but my soul will not. my hopes will turn to ash but my ghost will not. my bones can break but my matter cannot. my moments will end but their marrow will not. one day i will die, but there are parts of me that cannot.

--Ashli Wood