The man sat on the curb of Taco Bell at 7:30am, body folded in on itself, crouched down with knees to elbows. His head was in his hands, between his fingers the hair was buzzed close to the scalp. A woman in cornflower blue nursing scrubs and a black jacket pulled across the soft lines of her body. Her arm was around him, like she was pulling him close but she stared straight ahead. It hurts less if you look away. After a few minutes so did he, tears drying in the momentary quiet. They both looked out at the cars passing, lights changing, and felt the wind sting their eyes. Both their faces were heavy, solemn things cold in the morning air. It felt like I watched him age twenty years in the time it took for the bus to pull away from the light. He was thin, body swallowed up by the prices on the menu board, the cars passing them by in the drive through, and the weight of the rising sun. It shone down on his back almost a divine spotlight, and it laid clean the exhaustion of being alive every day. The beauty in that struggle.

February is unforgiving. The wind cuts like a cool slender knife and the ground turns to ice, death clings to the plants like morning dew. On the steps of the Calvary Baptist church, a february morning with clear blue skies like sapphires, a man lay on his back convulsing in a red hoodie. A red scaled fish, writhing in the hot blinding sun. Red like silver screen blood. Red like the lipstick your mother used to wear. Red like the lights of an ambulance. Red like something has gone terribly wrong. Red like death.

I watched from the window, almost hot in my jacket and the heater on the bus blowing gusts around my ankles. I imagined the biting cold, the blaring ache of his head pounding against the concrete. I wanted to scream but there were no words, to tell someone but there was no one to tell. They all saw and all looked away. It was a long light, I watched for five minutes and no one stopped. The people passing on the street stared straight ahead, hard and unflinching like they were something made of marble.

Someone had to remember, someone had to keep him alive in this moment, so I watched. Even as the light changed and we pulled away, I turned to watch until his stiff arms, his shaking legs, were gone. I don’t know what happened to him, I don’t know if he lived, if he died, and I never will.

A few days later as we were passing the church again, there was a new sign buried beside the steps, “no loitering.” I had to laugh like hell, because what else was there to do, to say. I laughed to myself the whole bus ride, praying I wouldn’t cry.

Today I saw two sets of bare shoulders reflecting the drowsy sunlight like dim diamonds set into the concrete. They were lying beneath a white sheet, a head tucked inside the crook of a shoulder, an arm extended over a chest. Dreaming as the cars raced by, flooding exhaust and bright lights against the dull business face overlooking the two. They slept with small, gentle smiles on a cardboard mattress. An unscathed island rising from the pools of plastic bags, empty soda cans, grease glazed take out boxes, cigarette butts and scratch offs scraped clean to the bone. In the center of it all, these two people slept like children, the sun rising above them in diluted reds and lavender. I wanted to frame this space in time and hang it up on the walls of the louvre, so that everyone could know what it felt like to be at peace. This is what it looked like, to find someone to be still with, it was love stripped down to nothing but skin and soul. I wondered what it took, for them to find this place they’d made. I wanted to ask them how they did it, how they managed to find each other. Instead I just watched their faces turn from red to green as I left that place forever.

This is a very short collection of poems which basically give a character profile on my grandmother, and a brief account of what it's like to live with cancer, and live with someone who has cancer. I hope you enjoy.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qIOJx5zjYY9OTiBOpwf3c-d99uHNbiOc0KC3g8V_sDs/edit?usp=sharing

i wanted to tell you

that night we spent in your dads pick up

with the stars above us and dew drops below

i traced the words along the skin between your wrist and elbow

hoping you couldn’t read brail

earlier that morning

we had sat and soaked in the sun underneath the delicate green leaves of the woods

you brought berries and a blanket and i brought cherries

you told me your favorite song and taught me the words and then we both cried

it reminded you of your mom

she left a while back

you still missed her after six years

she never gave a reason why

i didn’t know what to do so i grabbed your hand and pressed my lips against your knuckles

and kissed away the tears on your cheek

they were salty

but your lips were sweet

they tasted like raspberries

you told me the skin on my neck tasted like strawberries

and you left marks like cherries

we got back in your dads pick up and drove till the sun began to slip

then we parked in a field of tall grass and watched it all fade to black

i turned sixteen in january

it used to feel like a dull ache

i wanted to be born into the spring rain or summer grass

this year it felt like a big fuck you

to the frost to the wind and to the chill

i was born at the height of season where everything dies

i pour the basil and mint growing on my window sill out every november

no matter how well they’re doing that year

because between the cold and me they have no hope

i tend to wilt in the winter

the sun turns bitter and my mother’s house has no heat

i lay in the dark and birth twin streams

pinching my skin with numb fingertips

two years in a row

i wrote suicidal letters in the dark hours of my birthday

that was the song i sang to myself as i cried myself into another anniversary

this year was different

someone gave me a planter of soft red roses

i rubbed the petals between my finger and thumb

and i thought to myself

if something so thin delicate

can keep it’s colour

keep its shape

can continue to put down roots into the frost bitten ground

then so can i

six months ago, if someone hugged me i would have cried. i would have burst like a red balloon with its skin stretched too tightly over too much air.

i would have let out a sob like a puncture wound and my whole body would have deflated and curled in on it’s self.

i would have been a useless swath of limp rubber in their arms.

i was so starved for any kind of intimacy that a strangers shoulder bumping into mine on the stairs made my throat close up and my eyes burn

those were the days i thought i was dying

i felt my body on autopilot and knew it didn’t need me

so i sat back and watched everything unfold

and hoped to hell i’d make it out

It’s the colour grey on a clear and bright day

And black in the night time

A mountain that you climb and climb

And yet and yet

When the top is beneath your feet

Every foothold conquered

every crumbling edge just barely avoided

And you finally sit down

Finally breathe

The view that greets

Is white and cold

makes your fingers tremble and your stomach ache

Until so much motion and so much pain is all you can take

So you lay down in a soft bed of snow

And feel yourself go hollow

until

Your fingers lay still

and your stomach is calm

But your mind is so tired

So weak

And the way down so bleak

That you pull the covers over your feet and go to sleep

with chattering teeth and frost bitten dreams