Annie Wood, to breathe again, 2021 (Artist Website)
Charcoal, ink and acrylic paint on Yupo paper
Grief is a full sentence.
I didn’t apologize yet, but it’s your fault I’m not forgiven.
To fail is a full sentence.
I slept in my clothes, ate again at the merciful shawarma truck. Held someone’s cheek in my palm.
Quit. Returned. Admitted again for the first time that I failed. Cradled failure like a hard apple candy
inside my cheek, muscling it with my tongue, letting it sugar me slowly.
I remember when I said to my mother, Can I love people for a job? It’s the only thing I know how to do.
How she must have cringed, flexed her abdomen, remembering theft.
I remember loving. Feeling the orchid in my throat, the way love lifted me buoyant as a body in salt,
the water poured through me in the presence of strangers.
I remember love sharking me through the rooms of a nursing home, threading me like a needle
through the lives of strangers until I was theirs.
Two people said to me this week, Maybe you don’t need to grow in that way.
Love slipped on the black clogs to make rounds in the hospital.
Maybe you don’t need to learn to get better at anything.
This week our teacher asks, What does presence feel like?
I imagine myself reinventing a spiderweb in a room full of people, each one tugging a silvery side of
the line. We are laughing together, not because things are easy, but because they are real.
The candy in my mouth growing smaller.
I remember love when the sky blew on the roof of my head, knock of cloud on my bone. Love
when my hands still traditioned abundance.
This week someone said, The tradition unmade my body.
This week someone said, Be careful with this. It is the edge of the world.
When I am unsurveiled, I am a full sentence.
When I am alone, failure folds me up in its curtain. So quiet.
This week someone said, And where are you in this web.
And I said to my mother, I remember when I asked for permission to love. And she didn’t remember.
The hard apple of failure so small now, sucked small as a tooth.
One day I will write it all down.
How I gave up on healing.
How my sleeve got caught in the soup when I passed it down the table to someone who knew me.
I’ll say it once more. How I gave up on healing.
The sweet nothing of trying greening my tongue.