Nocturnal Labor

Inheritance

0410.2025 (5:51am)

I have known

something like love,

the way a flame knows

the shape of its wick—

brief,

then gone.

Loss arrives

without form—

a slow turning of color

left too long in water.

I do not speak

the dialect of daughters,

nor wear the surname

of belonging.

What came tonight

was not a break—

but a shift in the marrow,

a quiet consuming the room.

Nothing left but to feel

through pigment,

ghosts and echoes—

the things that do not ask

for understanding.

People pass through.

They name nothing.

And before they leave—

they unsee.

m.c.f.