Southern Discomfort

Somewhere deep within Oklahoma’s pine-painted countryside,
where red dirt works itself beneath the nails
and the county roads disappear
into fields gone colorless with heat,

there is a house
I still know by the way my body closes.

Its windows held the evening
like shut eyes.
Its porch sagged toward the earth.
Even the screen door
seemed tired of being touched.

Inside, a candle burned
on the kitchen counter—

one small animal of light
shaking in its glass.

I was a child.
I mistook its trembling
for welcome.

I held my hand above the flame
until warmth became pain,
until pain became proof
that I was near enough
to be loved.

Every time it blistered me,
I came back.

I thought love was a thing
you could starve yourself into.
I thought if I stood still long enough,
if I spoke softly enough,
if I made my hunger look like gratitude,

someone would turn toward me
and say my name
as though it had never been a burden
in their mouth.

I inherited the voice of ash and ember:

How to swallow what stung.
How to keep my eyes dry
while something inside me burned.
How to make a home of waiting.
How to mistake survival
for devotion.

I fed the fire with everything I was.
My lungs became its bellows.

But blood is only a river
the body is forced to remember.

It is not a promise.
It is not a door opening.
It is not a hand
reaching back through the dark.

There are losses with no funeral:

the mother who never arrived
though she wore a mother’s face,
the father-shaped silence
at the end of a hallway,
the ordinary tenderness
I kept setting a place for
at every table.

I grieve them now,
wrapped in the sigh of loblolly pines.

I let the red earth have
what it has always wanted from me:

the child who waited,
the child who apologized
for taking up room,
a tiny palm offered in simple surrender
again and again
to something that only knew
how to burn.

Then I wrap my hand
in clean white cloth.

I leave the candle lit.

Not as an offering.
Not as a prayer.

The fire leaves nothing but ash.

The flame
will never rise from its glass,
will never follow me down the road,
will never know an open sky.

I turn from walls that hold no welcome
toward voices capable of love.

There are hands
that understand the cost
without asking first
what I am willing to lose.

There is a home
that does not call itself home
while teaching me
to disappear.