Breathe

I remember when my lungs were clean,

my brain understood how

to properly control my voice, my mouth

didn’t bumble and stumble over bunny-slope words,

I knew what having a friend meant.

My joints were always aching with the growing pains

my soul never learned how to cope with, and now

they crack under the weight of my disappointments—

these cans on the shelves weren’t what

ten-year-old me expected, I guess—and the stress

of having to earn my right to live.

Counterfactuals turn wishful thinking into hate-speech

echoing in my brain. Boston seems nice, sometimes,

but admitting that means I’m not happy, so I’ll ignore

my popcorn knees and cracker-jack shoulders for now and

smile emptily at the serene scenery.

My heart now hangs differently in my chest, dangling

from a thread stretched so thin that it bobs

like a buoy in the harbor my ribs make, marking me

at my core, existing only as the center of an empty space

between the crying galaxies that have grown in my lungs.