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Shay's Archive Poem
I watch you unfold—
an argent bloom of bone and feather—
the quiet thunder of an angel
shivering beneath your skin.
I should let you rise,
let your beauty cleave the air,
let the wind kiss the hollows of your ribs.
But I do not.
I bind.
I weave my hands into the delicate lattice
of your wings,
folding them back like prayer beads,
tight against your spine,
so that you will not soar too far,
so that your light
does not leave me in shadow.
I love the angel I see in you—
the way your feathers catch the sun
like living silver—but
I love the ground too,
and the thought of you above me
terrifies me more than the night.
Every time you stretch,
every revelation of yourself,
I feel a crack in my grip.
I pull you down,
tether your glory to my chest,
and whisper that flight is dangerous,
that the sky might swallow you whole.
I am the keeper of your wings,
the jailer of your flight,
and in my fear,
I mistake my tethering for love.
I am the shadow
you have not yet flown beyond.
I watch as she curls
into the corners I have built for her,
her wings folding in on themselves
like soft paper,
creasing under my careful weight.
The shimmer dulls,
the light bends back into the shadows,
and I whisper to myself:
“Better this way. Safer. She will not leave.”
The angel forgets the song of air,
the pulse of open blue,
the taste of horizon on her tongue.
Her heart, once a drum of rising,
beats slower now,
syncopated to the rhythm of my fear.
She learns that wings can hurt,
that flight is not a gift but a trial.
And when she looks at me,
I see the quiet acceptance,
the soft resignation,
and I convince myself
that this is love:
that binding is protection,
that grounding is care,
that her shrinking wings
are proof of my devotion.
But the truth lingers in the cage’s shadow—
an angel in gilded bars may survive,
but she will never soar.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
Left slack at the edge of the violin,
an afterthought of gut and wire,
waiting for the bow that never descends.
Every note passes overhead
like birds stitching the sky.
The hollow body drinks their chorus,
yet no song grows inside this wood.
Ears open in the varnish,
dark mouths swallowing everything unfinished—
a concerto of failures,
a catalogue of unsung hours.
Different, always different,
not melody but margin,
not hand but handle.
Still the silence hums,
a taut ghost trembling
whenever others are touched.
What music it might have been
clings like rosin to the air,
faint, impossible,
vanishing before it begins.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
I butter the toast as if it were a pardon,
its crust breaking under my knife
like a sealed envelope.
The coffee is bitter ink,
a confession cooling in its cup.
I swallow it fast,
as if speed could trick the executioner.
When I buy myself flowers
I imagine them lining a witness box:
petals trembling,
each one swearing I once existed.
I take long baths,
the water climbing like hours,
the body softening, rehearsing its exit.
Every errand feels ceremonial:
the grocer weighing apples,
the cashier stamping receipts—
as if recording my presence
before the page turns blank.
I buy the trinket, the sugared cake,
because why shouldn’t the condemned
glitter a little,
lick the spoon clean?
The hours leer,
their faces blindfolded.
Any minute the rope could tighten—
a phone could ring with pardon.
So I go on feeding myself,
scraping honey from the jar,
gilding my throat
for the last song or the first acquittal,
as though I might vanish mid-bite,
or else be called back,
my name suddenly rinsed clean
from the record.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
The horizon is a blade—
it glints whether I run toward it
or watch it withdraw.
Each dawn splits me open,
spilling a slow trickle of salt,
as if the sea is feeding me to itself,
one grain at a time.
I know the undertow’s handwriting—
it pulls not to drown,
but to measure how far my lungs will stretch.
Even in absence,
the shore presses its ghost lips
to the soles of my feet,
branding me with wet fire.
The days arrive like heavy-winged birds,
falling or flying—it makes no difference.
Either I am lifted
or I am stitched to the air by wanting.
Both keep me in motion.
So tell me—
how could I curse the water
when even the ebb feels like an arrival,
and every hunger it leaves behind
is proof my compass still works?
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
I’m sorry I never fit inside the rooms you gave me.
The walls bent inward,
doors swelled shut,
and I mistook silence for safety.
I’m sorry —
I’m sorry for every quiet collapse you never saw,
for the teeth I swallowed instead of words,
for becoming a stranger in the house you built.
I’m sorry —
I’m sorry for leaving them in the dark,
for the sharp edges I handed them as toys,
for not learning softness soon enough.
I’m sorry —
I’m sorry for being her doubted light,
for suspecting every kindness, as undeserved as may be,
for ever thinking her hands could be knives
when they only ever stitched me back together.
At least you have the leather cut by my own unsteady hands,
and the thread pulled through skin and paper.
Every seam knows my fingerprints,
every sheet carries the tremor of being chosen.
Your words fall into them
like rain into cupped palms —
I hold them,
ink-wet and breathing,
long after you’ve left the room.
I’m sorry for the mirrors I broke on purpose,
so I wouldn’t have to see the face
I already hated.
I’m sorry for the jars I hid underground —
breaths I never let go of,
fragments of days I left unlived,
songs I hummed only to the dark.
I’m sorry I never knew how to hold quiet without smothering it.
I’m sorry I never knew how to hold noise without flinching.
I’m sorry for every time I confused love with survival.
For staying in wreckage,
because leaving felt worse than burning.
I’m sorry I called myself stupid before anyone else could.
I’m sorry I rehearsed unworthiness so often
it became a prayer.
I’m sorry for falling in love with character,
for clutching uniqueness like a life raft,
for mistaking rescue for belonging.
I’m sorry for the softness that terrifies me —
for flinching at gentle hands,
because storms were the only language I learned.
I’m sorry for being unreasonable,
for knowing it,
and still not knowing how to stop.
I’m sorry for every apology
that feels like an exit.
I’m sorry for how often
I’ve written my own ending in my head.
I’m sorry this sounds like goodbye.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
I have been watering it for months—
the small black bulb in the cupboard
that I never let touch sunlight.
It swelled in the dark,
fed on steam from my cooking breath,
fat with the whispers I never spoke aloud.
I told myself it was only a seed,
a pebble in soil, nothing more.
I would open the door,
look at it once, and close it—
like checking the locks before bed.
It learned the shape of my glances.
But today, I reached in.
Today, I held it in my palm.
Its skin was slick as a fish
and when I pulled, the roots screamed up from the earth,
all tendon and white hair,
and the cupboard air smelled of rust.
You said it casually—
your mouth arranging the words
like setting a cup down on a table.
As if the syllables were a button
popped from a shirt, no one’s fault.
I felt my chest open—
not like a door,
but like a letter slit with a knife.
Paper-heart curling, bleeding ink.
You were already talking about something else,
your voice trailing petals across the floor.
I sat very still,
the bulb still in my hand,
its black head beating against my pulse.
I did not crush it.
I only held it tighter
until my fingers forgot they could let go.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
The days crack like porcelain
under the heel of my wanting.
I am a spine of restless birds,
feathers slick with salt and early light—
my mouth tasting the metal
of doors I have not opened.
They ask me why.
Why walk without a destination?
Why carry a compass
if you don’t believe in north?
I tell them—
the road does not need an ending
to be worth taking.
Some skies are meant to be looked at,
not arrived under.
I keep moving
because stillness feels like rust,
and the wind has a way
of remembering my name.
The Great Perhaps is not a prize—
it’s the taste of rain
before the cloud bursts,
the echo that lingers
longer than the voice.
If you need a goal,
call this my goal:
to know how a streetlamp hums at early morning,
to count the freckles on a stranger’s knuckles,
to find out if the moon
is the same shade of bone in every city.
I have no anchor,
only her pulse like a lantern in my palm.
We are marrow and tinder,
always burning toward a horizon
that refuses to hold still—
and I love her for it.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
It clung like ivy, patient, green with hunger —
wrapped itself around every beam,
crept beneath shingles,
rooted in the cellar’s damp breath.
I mistook it for the house itself —
fed it rain, fed it dust,
let it climb my windows
and press its leaves to the glass
until I could no longer see daylight.
But rot loosens quietly.
One morning the vines lay slack,
detached in their own weight,
as if my silence was permission
for them to fall away.
Now the walls breathe unchoked,
bare brick catching sun like raw skin.
Floorboards sing with sudden emptiness.
The air is new — thin, sharp —
a future echoing through cleared rooms.
I walk barefoot through debris,
lighter than I have ever been.
For the first time
I do not flinch at my own footsteps.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
You stand with your suitcase like a buoy,
bright, bobbing in the shallows,
and I am the pier—
rooted, barnacled, smelling of old salt and rope.
You tell me you’ll stay
if I keep my hands wrapped round your ankles,
but I know the tide you carry in your ribs.
Even on windless days
it pounds against my palms,
shouting for the open mouth of the horizon.
The gap is a sandbar—
we could walk there together,
let our knees sink into its damp skin,
pretend it will hold us longer than a season.
But I have seen what happens
when the sea grows impatient.
It chews through land like bread,
swallows the footprints before we can name them.
I want to say go after the storm has passed,
when our nets are mended,
when the gulls return to roost in my hair.
But your moon is full now.
It pulls at your water
even when you swear it won’t.
And I—
I cannot anchor you
without learning how to drown.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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Shay's Archive Poem
I cradle you in both hands—
the cup is hotter than the blood in me.
I sip until my tongue blisters,
as if pain is the only proof
that I can still be filled.
The table is a witness—
its pale skin bruises under you.
You leave your halo of tannin,
a brown eclipse widening,
seeping into the grain like rot that knows my name.
I line the coasters in military rows,
little shields of cork and cloth,
but you slip past their defenses—
a siege of warmth,
an invasion I invite.
Soon the whole table will be dark.
Soon my palms will smell of leaves and ash.
But you seep through everything,
and I wonder if love is not the cup,
nor the hand holding it,
but the stain that stays after.
Copyright © shay's archive | Year Posted 2025
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