Bruised Halo

soft heresy. sacred ruin. poems I publish in secret.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Attachments

I am attached to you To the moments when you laugh To the way my body feels around you To being seen in a way I did not expect I am in love with you With your quiet With your noise With your afterglow You are the love I didn’t expect But yearned for every day One day it was desire, comfort, curiosity and escape The next thing I know you’d wound yourself around my heart like a snake I did not fall in love with a title Because you have never truly been mine I fell in love with something in between The fine line Between friend And lover That we dared to tread with barefoot feet Something that has dared itself To be romantic and sweet Filing emotional permits and taking emotional receipts For a house we never built But somehow still haunt I have loved you in thresholds In doorways In almosts In the space between your hands And what they were willing to hold I have loved you without a name for it Without maps Without a place to plant its roots And maybe that is why this hurts so badly Because I cannot bury what never had a body Cannot grieve what no one else agreed was alive But I know it was I know by the way I softened By the way I laughed By the way I forgot for a moment That love has ever been anything but safe You are not mine But something in me belongs to you anyways And I hate that I miss you And I’m trying To unwind you from my heart Without tearing myself open In the process

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Hurry Up & Wait

Many have told me

to pull myself up by my bootstraps

as if I have not already used the straps

to tie my children’s shoes,

to secure the trash bags around our lives,

to hold the roof up

while another home

becomes temporary.

Many have told me

there is help available

if I would just hurry up

and wait.

If I would simply fill out the forms

and compile the documents,

if I would show them

my toner-stained fingertips,

my last nickel,

my last penny,

the receipt for the printer paper

I bought

so I could prove

I was poor enough

to need help.

I have written disabled

so many times

it started to feel

less like truth

and more like a crime

I was confessing to.

I have filled out forms

until my name

stopped looking like my own.

Until my children’s names

became case numbers.

Until need

became evidence.

Until exhaustion

became a box

I forgot to check.

And I do all of this

while standing in the fire,

with two disabled children

looking to me

for advocacy,

for breakfast,

for socks,

for safety,

for a mother

who can translate

the world’s cruelty

into something

they can survive.

They ask me

to explain our limitations

in the smallest space provided.

As if our limitations

are the problem.

As if the problem is not

the staircase,

the deadline,

the locked door,

the income cliff,

the empty office,

the hold music,

the woman on the phone

who says,

“I understand,”

in a voice

that has never had to.

They ask me

what support we need.

I want to write:

A world

that does not make mothers

beg for the right

to keep their children housed.

I want to write:

A system

that does not require

a disabled woman

to perform competence

while actively collapsing.

I want to write:

Food.

Water.

Medicine.

Time.

A door that locks.

A bed that belongs to us.

A bathroom I can use

without calculating

whose boundary

I am breaking

by being human.

But there is never enough room

for the truth.

So I make my handwriting smaller.

I make my grief legible.

I make my panic polite.

I staple the documents

in the correct order.

I sign my name

like a woman

who still believes

her name means something.

And then I wait.

I wait with children

who do not understand

why the grown-ups keep saying

help is coming

but no one arrives.

I wait with a body

that keeps sending warning signs

in red ink.

I wait with a heart

that has been asked

to become a shelter,

a school,

a caseworker,

a crisis line,

a medical chart,

a prayer.

I wait

while people tell me

to be grateful

for the hallway

outside the locked door.

I wait

while they measure

how desperate I am

by how well

I can keep speaking calmly.

And when I finally tremble,

when I finally cry,

when I finally say

I cannot carry this anymore,

they look at me

like the fire

is a personal failure.

Like I should have planned better

for the burning.

Like I should have saved more money

before becoming ash.

Like I should have known

that survival

would require

three forms of identification,

proof of residency,

a working phone,

reliable transportation,

childcare,

printer access,

a nervous system

made of steel,

and the ability

to wait patiently

inside an emergency.

But I am not patient.

I am not calm.

I am not an inspiring story

about resilience.

I am a mother

with smoke in her lungs.

I am a woman

who has been handed

one more packet

while her whole life

catches fire.

I am tired

of being called strong

by people

who have no intention

of helping me

set anything down.

I do not want applause

for surviving this.

I want water.

I want witness.

I want someone

to read the forms,

look up,

and say:

This should not have happened to you.

This should not be happening

to anyone.

And until that happens,

I will keep writing

disabled

mother

poor

sick

trying

trying

trying

until the paper tears,

until the ink runs,

until someone understands

that this poem

is not a metaphor.

It is an application

for mercy.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

[prettythingsicantkeep]

i love you.

you matter.

it hurt to leave without saying goodbye.

[nixscriptum]

[prettythingsicantkeep]

The Chapel of Almost

I have loved you best

from rooms you never entered,

from the far side of a message left unread,

from the quiet after your name

finished ringing in my body.

There are people who arrive like weather.

You arrived like a match

in a house I had forgotten was full of candles.

And I—

foolish little altar,

tender little ghost—

lit up everywhere.

I did not mean

to make a religion out of almost.

I did not mean

to learn the shape of your absence

better than my own hands.

But there you were,

not mine,

not gone,

not close enough to keep,

not distant enough to survive.

A cruel miracle.

A sweet bruise.

A song I keep playing

even when it makes the room ache.

When you look at me,

the world softens its jaw.

The teeth go back into the dark.

My body remembers

it is allowed to be warm.

You make rest feel possible.

You make wanting feel holy.

You make me feel seen

in the exact places

I have spent years learning how to hide.

And then you leave—

not cruelly,

not loudly,

just back into your life,

back behind the glass,

back where I cannot follow

without becoming smaller

than love should ever ask me to be.

So I love you from here.

From the edge of the fence.

From the other side of the song.

From the ache between

goodnight

and I wish you meant stay.

I love you in secret,

which is to say

I have become very good

at holding the sun in my mouth

and pretending it is not burning me.

I say your name nowhere

and somehow say it everywhere.

In the grocery aisle

when a laugh sounds almost like yours.

In the blue light of midnight.

In the stupid little jokes

I save and never send.

In every song that knows too much.

In every warm thing

that asks my heart,

is this him?

and every lonely thing

that answers,

no, baby. not yet.

There are days

I am embarrassed by the tenderness.

By how much of me still turns

toward the smallest sign of you.

A word.

A glance.

A door left half-open.

A maybe wearing your face.

Limerence is such a clinical word

for this much moonlight.

It does not explain

how sweet it feels

to be ruined gently.

How I can miss you

while you are still alive,

still reachable,

still somewhere

under the same enormous sky,

laughing, working, sleeping,

being ordinary

while I am over here

making stained glass

out of every almost.

I know the truth.

You are not a promise.

You are not a home

just because my heart

takes its shoes off near you.

You are not mine

just because something in me

knows how to recognize you

in the dark.

But oh—

what a beautiful hurt

to have known a person

who made my spirit sit up straighter.

What a terrible gift

to be reminded

that I can still want

with my whole chest.

That I can still be soft.

Still be foolish.

Still be lit from within

by one quiet, impossible man

who may never understand

how many poems

had to crawl out of me

because he once looked

and I felt found.

So let this be the place

I put the ache down.

Not because I am done loving you.

Not because the flame has died.

But because even a candle

deserves a window.

Because even secret love

needs somewhere to breathe.

Because I cannot keep swallowing daylight

and calling it devotion.

I love you.

There.

Softly.

Safely.

Where it cannot ask anything of you.

I love you

like a prayer folded into a coat pocket.

Like a sunflower turning

even after the sun has gone.

Like a house with one lamp on

for someone who may never come home.

And if you never know,

let the stars know.

Let the songs know.

Let every trembling part of me

that once believed it was too much

hear this and finally rest:

I did love you.

I did.

I did.

And it was secret,

and it was far away,

and it was aching,

and it was sweet.

And for a little while,

even from the shadows,

it made me shine.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Part V: Rebuilding (High-Water Mark)

Afterward, there’s a silence that doesn’t feel like calm— it feels like shock. The sky looks innocent. That’s the insult. Sunlight on wreckage like a joke nobody laughs at. You step out and the world is altered. Not destroyed entirely— worse. Changed. Everything is where it shouldn’t be. Things you loved turned sideways. Things you trusted missing. You find pieces of your life in strange places. A photograph face-down in mud. A chair in the yard like it tried to escape. A name you can’t say anymore without tasting stormwater. This is where grief becomes practical again. You begin the slow work of “what now.” You make piles. Keep. Toss. Dry out. Maybe. You throw away what cannot be saved and feel cruel doing it, like you’re betraying the version of you who bought it, held it, believed in it. You scrub. You sweep. You lift. Your body hurts in a way that feels almost holy— proof you are still a living thing. And then the strangest part: You start rebuilding without permission. Not because you’re ready. Because the world doesn’t pause for your mourning schedule. So you rebuild in fragments: A bed made again. A candle lit. A text sent that says, “I’m here,” even if you’re not sure what “here” means yet. You learn what survived. Not everything. Never everything. But something. You. The part of you that stayed. The part of you that did not become debris even when it would’ve been easier to let go. You look at the high-water mark stained on the wall— that dirty line of proof— and you don’t romanticize it. You don’t call it a lesson. You don’t call it a blessing. You call it what it is: The measure of what you lived through. And you keep going. Not with shiny hope. With plywood hope. With duct-tape faith. With the kind of courage that looks like cleaning and making calls and starting over while still crying. You rebuild until your hands remember they are yours. You rebuild until your name fits again. You rebuild until the puddle becomes ground. And one day— not soon, not sweetly— you notice you can breathe without flinching at the sky. Not because storms stop coming. Because you learned how to anchor. Because you learned how to hold on. Because you are still here.

[nonefrancesca]

the art of listening and noticing

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Part IV: The Eyewall (The Worst Part)

Then it comes back with teeth. Not rain now— violence. Wind that doesn’t just push— it claims. It grabs at the roof like it’s peeling an orange. It reaches through cracks and yanks. This is the part they don’t explain right when they talk about storms. They make it sound like weather. Like something outside you. But this is personal. This is the hurricane walking through your house calling everything by name. The lights flicker. The walls shudder. Your stomach becomes a fist. You crouch in the tightest place you can find— a hallway, a bathroom, the corner of your own ribs— and you try to become small enough to survive. The sound is enormous. A freight train. A god clearing its throat. A thousand slammed doors all at once. And the worst part? The knowing that you can’t hold it all. You can’t hold the roof. You can’t hold the past. You can’t hold people who have already decided to become wind. You can only hold what your hands can hold, what your heart can hold— and even that feels like a structure under stress. Objects become missiles. Memories become shrapnel. Your own thoughts start breaking apart into emergency instructions: Stay low. Stay breathing. Stay alive. Don’t look. Don’t listen. Don’t— Panic returns, but now it’s not a flashlight. Now it’s a flood inside you, rushing for the exits. You taste copper. You count seconds like prayer beads. You press your palm to your chest like you can keep your spirit from lifting off. Outside, everything is being rearranged. Trees. fences. names. The story of your life getting ripped from its binding. And you realize— with a clarity so sharp it’s almost calm— that this is what “losing” feels like: Not sadness. Not even despair. Just the body learning it cannot control the world, only its own grip. So you grip. You hold your breath and then you don’t— you force air in like you’re stealing it back from the storm. You ride it. You endure it. And you hate it. And you survive it anyway. Because something in you is harder than weather. Because something in you refuses to be carried off without leaving claw marks.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Part III: The Eye (That Strange Calm)

And then— the world does something unholy. It quiets. Not peace. Not safety. Just… silence, like the storm stepped outside to reload. The air is wrong— warm and still, a calm that doesn’t belong to nature. The kind that makes your body suspicious of its own relief. You stand there in it, dripping, surrounded by the half-saved life you hauled upward like offering. Everything looks familiar in a way that hurts. The same walls. The same rooms. But the feeling is different— like your home has been renamed by something violent. You can hear your own breath now. It sounds too loud, like guilt. Because you’re still here. Because it paused. Because you didn’t break when it tried. And that thought is dangerous— the one that creeps in soft-footed: Maybe it’s over. But you know hurricanes. You know patterns. You know the trick where the sky gives you a lullaby so you’ll put your guard down and call it a miracle. You don’t trust the calm. You use it. You wring out what you can. You charge your phone. You check on the ones you can reach. You stare at the ceiling like you can bargain with it. Your hands shake now that they’re not busy. Your mind tries to replay everything in high-definition: what you grabbed, what you couldn’t, what you left behind because your arms are not infinite. The eye makes room for feeling. It tries to turn you into a statue of all the losses you’ve held. So you swallow it down like seawater— brackish, burning, impossible to spit out completely. You whisper to yourself: stay ready. stay ready. stay— Because you can feel it, can’t you? The pressure rising again. The world leaning. A hush that isn’t mercy— it’s the inhale.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Part II: Flood Warning (The Pouring)

It starts like a rumor you can’t outrun. A drip. A spill. A soft insistence in the walls. Then the sky opens like it has been waiting for your last good minute. Rain doesn’t fall— it arrives, violent and certain, and suddenly everything is loud: gutters, windows, your own blood. You tell yourself: don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t— But panic is practical. Panic is a flashlight. Panic is the body saying, Move. So you move. You become hands. You become lists. You become the kind of creature that can decide in three seconds what matters most. Keys. Wallet. Phone. Medicine. Papers with your name on them— proof you existed before the water tried to edit you. And the small holy things: the photo that still smells like laughter, the shirt that carries someone’s arms, the note you kept because it was the last time they sounded like themselves. You don’t take everything. You can’t. That’s the cruelty of a flood— it forces you to choose between beloveds, between versions, between objects that were once a life. The water climbs anyway. First the floor. Then the thresholds. Then the places you thought were safe by default. It finds the low points. It finds the soft spots. It finds you. And you feel that old, awful knowledge— the one you tried to ignore in the build up— click into place: This is how it happens. This is how things go to shit. Not with one dramatic collapse but with a hundred fast decisions made with shaking hands. You start lifting what you can up, up, up— as if height is salvation. As if you can outrank a storm with a bookshelf. You brace doors. You text people who don’t answer. You call someone and hang up because you can’t afford to hear your own voice crack. Outside, the world is water. Inside, the world is also water. Even your thoughts are starting to slosh. And still you tell yourself: breathe. breathe. breathe. As if breath is a sandbag. As if lungs can hold back weather. You keep moving because if you stop you will feel it— the grief waiting on the staircase like a stranger in your house. You keep moving because you know how quickly love becomes debris. How quickly a person becomes a memory. How quickly a home becomes a story you tell with your jaw clenched. You move faster. You misplace things. You find things. You drop something precious and you don’t even have time to mourn it properly— you just whisper sorry like sorry is a rope. The storm doesn’t care. The storm doesn’t care. The storm— And then, for one second, the water pauses, like it’s taking a breath. Like it’s considering you. Like it wants to see whether you’ll fall apart. Your heart kicks against your ribs— a trapped bird, a siren, a prayer with teeth. You stand there soaked, holding what you managed to save, knowing it might not be enough, knowing it’s never enough— and you do the only thing a human can do at the edge of losing everything: You decide again. You decide again. You decide again. Not because you’re fearless— because you’re here. Because you’re trying. Because the storm is real and you are still, somehow, realer. And somewhere under the roar of rain and ruin, a thought flickers— small, stubborn, half-drowned— I will not be carried away without my own hands on the wheel. Not this time. Not all of me.

[moninils]

No one but writers can understand this feeling... ABSOLUTE RELIEF.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

Part I: Barometric (The Build-Up)

The storm doesn’t start with thunder. It starts with your skin. The air goes metal. The light turns thin. The house holds its breath like it knows what’s coming and doesn’t want to be blamed. Somewhere in the distance something changes its mind— a cloud, a person, a job, a love— and you feel it before you have proof. That’s the worst part: the knowing. Not the dramatic kind. Not the “I saw it in a dream.” The quiet animal knowing that lifts the hair on your arms and makes you check the door twice even though the lock hasn’t moved. You start taking inventory like a thief is already inside. What would I grab first if the water comes? Not the couch. Not the dishes. Not the nice version of me that believes in normal days. I mean the real things: papers. medicine. the photos you can’t replace. the number you call when your voice breaks. You begin to pre-grieve. You practice loss like a drill. Like maybe preparation can bargain with the universe. But storms don’t negotiate. They arrive. And you— you’ve been here before, haven’t you? You’ve learned the sound of a life about to tip. The way a sentence can become a blade. The way silence can become a floodplain. The way love can turn into weather. You tell yourself: don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. As if your lungs are a town hall meeting and fear is waiting for public comment. You try to act casual. You fold laundry. You answer texts. You do normal-person things with a mind that’s already stacking sandbags. Because the truth is the storm is not here yet— but it is close enough to taste. And you can feel how everything you own, everything you’ve held, everyone you’ve loved— could become debris if you hesitate. So you stand in the doorway of your own life listening to the sky load the gun. And you whisper to whatever god still answers: Please— let me be quick enough. Let me be smart enough. Let me be more than a body in the path of it. Please— let this not be the beginning. But it is. You can tell by the way your heart has already started swimming.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

House We Couldn’t Save

We were a house once. Not a mansion. Not a dream. Just a place two people made livable— a sink that worked, a bed that held us, a little lamp of laughter in the corner that made the dust look holy. I loved you like a homeowner loves a future: patient, practical, stupidly faithful. I tried to be your friend first— handing you tools without calling them tools, calling it us every time something creaked. Then the world shut the doors. Covid came like boarded windows, like air you didn’t trust, like days stacked on days until the rooms forgot what company felt like. We stayed inside each other until we couldn’t tell what was love and what was simply no exit. And the house started taking hits. Finances lit in the walls— not bright, not dramatic, the slow electrical kind, the kind that turns future into smoke while you’re still standing in the kitchen trying to pretend dinner is normal. My health went sideways. The roof didn’t leak— it gave way. I learned how fragile a body can be when the world refuses to slow down and you’re still expected to carry groceries and gravity and a marriage. We drowned too. Not all at once. Debt is a patient flood. First it’s damp carpet. Then the baseboards swell. Then you stop opening certain doors because the smell tells you what you already know. Homelessness— that word is a storm siren people don’t believe until it’s inside their own house. We scraped ourselves together anyway. We did what people do when pride is the last furniture left: we patched. we promised. we survived. But survival is not the same as repair. Because I became the upkeep. I became the one with a bucket and a list and the steady, unromantic panic of noticing the foundation shifting and being the only one who felt the tilt. I fixed what I could. I caulked. I covered. I carried. I learned the language of emergencies so fluently it started to sound like my name. And you— you were in the house with me but not in it. You were a man who lived like a guest in the wreckage we shared, calling yourself a martyr because you didn’t leave, and calling it loyalty because you stayed resentful. The rot didn’t happen overnight. Rot never does. Rot is what happens when something is left unattended and called “fine” long enough that “fine” becomes a lie you decorate. Eventually I stopped. Not because I didn’t love you, but because love isn’t a beam you can hold up alone forever without your arms turning to bone. So we remained. A loveless marriage like a condemned building with our names still on the mailbox. And then— the final collapse. Not a single moment. Just the quiet math of it: a foundation you can’t replace while one person refuses to lift. Now we’re trapped in the rotting wreckage, still navigating around holes in the floor, still calling it a home because the paperwork says so and the world is expensive and leaving is a whole new kind of disaster you have to plan for with shaking hands. I don’t want to punish you. I want us both to be safe. I want us both to be free in a way that doesn’t require my spine as the exit route. I want you to move on— to build something that is yours without using my labor as the lumber. I want to stop inhaling smoke and calling it air. We were a house once. We tried. We lived. We loved. But the truth is this: A house can survive fire. A house can survive flood. A house can survive storms. But a house cannot survive only one person doing the saving.

[literaryvein]

L. V., from the year i wrote in the dark

[prettythingsicantkeep]

puddle theology

Loss didn’t hit once.

It practiced.

One clean blow would’ve been merciful—

a headline, a funeral, a closed door.

But this was a long, ugly arithmetic

where the answer keeps changing

and it’s always your chest.

First it was a person.

Then it was another.

Then it was someone still breathing

but suddenly gone from the shape of your days,

like they got edited out of the story

and you’re the only one who noticed.

Some losses came with flowers.

Some came with silence.

Some came with “I love you”

spoken like a knife deciding to be polite.

And the small ones—

the dozens of tiny thefts—

the plans that don’t happen,

the texts that die midair,

the way your name tastes different

in someone else’s mouth

right before they stop using it.

Grief isn’t always a sea.

Sometimes it’s a puddle.

Not deep enough to drown properly—

just deep enough to soak your socks

so every step is cold and squelching

and humiliatingly survivable.

You stand there anyway,

because leaving would require

believing in a “there” that isn’t this.

You look up

and the universe is doing that thing

where it keeps being vast and pretty

like a stranger with good skin.

No speck of light.

Not even the rude little kind

that flickers just to tease you.

Only the sky,

and you,

and the fact that you are still here

with your heart in your hands

like an animal you didn’t mean to catch.

Loss by death.

Loss by choice.

Loss by slow neglect.

Loss by love that didn’t know

how to hold anything without bruising it.

And then the strangest loss—

the one no one throws a service for:

You,

vanishing in a relationship

one compromise at a time,

until you’re standing in the mirror

trying to remember

which parts of you were original.

People talk about “moving on”

like grief is a hallway

and not a sinkhole.

Like you don’t have to learn

new physics to stand again.

So here’s what I know

from the bottom of the puddle:

Sometimes you don’t find light.

Sometimes you make it—

not with hope, not with healing,

but with the stubborn, ugly act

of naming what happened.

Saying: this mattered.

Saying: I was here.

Saying: I loved.

Saying: it hurt.

And if all you can do tonight

is sit in the wet,

and blink,

and keep breathing through the ache—

that still counts as survival.

That still counts as proof

that you haven’t disappeared completely.

Not yet.

[prettythingsicantkeep]

BUCKETS

I watch the world burn

like it’s always been burning

and I’m just late to noticing

the smell in my hair.

The sky is orange again—

not sunrise, not romance,

just the soft glow of consequences

licking the edges of everything.

People keep calling it history.

Like that makes it cleaner.

Like that makes the smoke

less intimate.

Meanwhile I’m in my own small kingdom

with a sink full of water,

a mouth full of ash,

and a heart that flares

if you look at it sideways.

I’ve got fires with names.

Fires with anniversaries.

Fires that started as a spark

and learned to speak fluently

in my nervous system.

I am not made of calm.

I am made of try.

I keep my tenderness

like a blade I refuse to dull—

not because it’s safe,

but because it’s mine.

Outside, the whole planet

seems committed to combustion.

Inside, I’m counting breaths

like matches I don’t strike.

Cup.

Carry.

Pour.

Repeat.

The world is loud with burning—

sirens, headlines, hot takes—

but my life is quieter,

more honest:

a towel pressed to a wound,

a glass of water set beside the bed,

hands shaking

and still choosing gentleness

like it’s a spell.

Sometimes I want to go feral—

rip the air open,

bite through the lie

that I’m supposed to be graceful

while everything collapses.

Sometimes I do.

But then I hear it—

the thin, stubborn sound

of something in me

refusing to become smoke.

So I stay.

Not because I believe in miracles.

Because I believe in methods.

Because I’ve seen

what one steady hand can do

when the world is fire

and you are tired

and you are still here

with water in your palms

like an offering,

like a weapon,

like a promise:

I won’t let my whole life

go up.

Not if I can help it.