Tenuous Miracles

I watched her crumpling up the paper with her eyes, throwing away emotions that regret tainted with scribbled ink. To her, her words were never enough; pleading emotions spilled out of mascara plastered tear ducts, as the evolution of catharsis opened up the spout to her soul, and I watched black rain, amazed by the subtle beauty of a quiet girl’s inhibition plucking itself apart. She was trying so hard, to manifest poetry with a used up ink pen; words half written left indentations on the paper …between us, I could feel the rest sinking into my skin. She tried so hard. Too hard. It would never be enough, not to her. She wanted her words to grip the wounds of the Earth, and piece them back together with silken metaphors, and velvet prose. I think she thought it would make her feel alive again. But what she didn’t realize was, she didn’t need to write those feelings, not today, not in that tattered journal marked “Tenuous Miracles” .. In that moment, she was the miracle. She was poetry; living and breathing …poetry And I had the other half of her story tucked within me, waiting to be read. -James Kelley 2014, All rights reserved.