Three poems, Joshua Walker

If It Still Hurts, It Means You’re Awake

That’s the rule. The rest is metaphor.

Your heart- a pit viper curled in a shoe.

Your breath- a coin flipped into a dry well.

Your name – an echo

that winces when it’s called.

If it still hurts, maybe you outlived the ritual.

Maybe the smoke didn’t take.

Maybe your ribs learned

to sing without permission.

Once, your doctor asked if you heard voices.

You said: only when they need something.

He smiled like that meant “no.”

If it still hurts,

it might be the prayer decomposing.

It might be God peeling your name

off his tongue like a scab.

It might be

you,

again,

asking to be known

and bleeding when you’re not.

You Were Born With Your Hands Full:

A splinter of moon,

a dead wasp,

your grandfather’s last breath.

You’ve never known how to be empty.

Even now

you carry pills,

lost buttons,

a girl’s hair from a bus seat in 2011

you never got to return.

Grief taught you balance.

Joy taught you guilt.

Your shoulders forgot

how to drop.

Once you told someone

you couldn’t cry anymore.

They said:

Then let the salt come through your palms.

You dig holes in the dirt

just to watch them stay open.

You believe in silence.

But not the kind

that forgives.

The Mouth Remembers Before the Mind

The salt of her skin,

the word you swallowed

so hard it grew teeth.

Your tongue is a reliquary.

There are prayers lodged

in your molars.

One cracks every time

you lie about being okay.

Sometimes you dream

of bees nested in your throat,

buzzing secrets your body

never agreed to keep.

You speak in thorns now.

You call it healing.

You call it poetry.

You call it

not dying.

Your mother’s voice

was the first ghost

to take up space in you.

You were seven.

You still are.

You wake with a taste

you can’t place

a little iron,

a little mercy,

a little god.