Everything Hard is Tangled
​Published in Impspired Literary Magazine
poetry
​
Old women pace
the night and want endings
to be clarifying
but they know that a body
is a thing to be obeyed
not ordered my mechanical time.

They know they cannot live
in a constant state of refusal
that healed doesn’t mean restored
and that the past
is not a morbidly
rare treasure to cling to.

They write of heartbeats
and resolutions
and collapsing wave functions
and try not to believe
everything they
think in the graying.

They remember all of the people
to write down
who might be a dim recollection
by next sundown
and then indecipherable
by the dark of night.

They dream
when awake
to the calls
of the ghosts
of their children
shifting in their sleep.

They can stand to notice lonely things
even when they get up for more water
at 3 am and end up writing this
because they know a body
is a thing to be obeyed
and that everything hard is tangled.