Spoiler Alerts; 2024 Edition

After Chelsie Diane

You step onto more airplanes
than ever before.
Drive more miles.
Walk more distances.
Cover so much new territory,
that you are remade, again.
Mostly alone, but also with everyone
who’s been walking next to you
when it all felt like a slog.
Maps are created in your name.

You become a cartographer.

You crave mornings again.
Waking early to watch what
often goes sleepily unnoticed.
Cats beckoning bluebird feathers
through the double paned glass.
A new rolled leaf emerging
from the Monstera by the window;
a lighter minted baby green.

The smallest freckles on her cheeks.

You can finally be still,
because you are wholly aligned.
Sit in the dark of every morning
with a chest full of new breath
rising and falling like a
moon-pulled tide.
Speak in broken poems
that by night, will take the shape
of entirely new worlds.

You still watch his shoulders
rise and fall like ancient canyons
before the morning sun crests
the mountains to the east;
waiting as the longest rays enter
through cracks in the blinds,
each a welcoming siren song
washing him with radiating gold.
He will always say it is too bright;
and you will still memorize
everything it illuminates.

You wrap yourself in the arms
of women who have become blood.
Curl up in cabins in the woods
with natives who speak your
language. Goddesses who pull
words from your throat like
anchors at the bottom
of the ocean – show parts
of your erratic heart beat
so whole and full of blood you can’t
believe your own iron and oxygen
birthed and sustained such stanzas.
You give all your breath over
when they might not have any –
just to hear them speak their own poems,
help fuel their furious fires.

You burn it all down together.

You worry less
about the work you must produce
or the lunch that needs packing.
Instead, know the stitches that
hold life together will get sewn
and your bare hands and raw mouth
are made only for poems and
declarations of the purest devotion.
A body of experience building.
Truth telling and seeking.
The naming of new things.

Because surely,
there will be many new things.
Surely, the only resolution is love.