and look how the clay gets under the nails, i mean
really packed into the beds, the red stubborn earth
of an old entitlement i carried around the yard
like a sledgehammer, and isn’t it something
how sour the soil turns when you’re the one
who drove the roots dead, how you have to kneel down
in the gravel in the middle of your life, right there in the hot
unforgiving sun, and stop calling the garden you trampled a sanctuary
to finally sit on the overturned bucket in the dirt
and say to the person across from you, i was cruel, i was trained to conquer
and i brought the poison into this ground with my own two hands
oh, the godawful sweating labor of taking the thing you were taught to be
by its scruff, hauling the rusted pickaxe out into the brush
after half a lifetime of taking up all the air in the yard
when everyone else built like you has settled for the slow rot of being right
to hack down into the overgrown thorns of who you used to be, reaching
for the venom you buried under the fence line
and dragging it out into the light, unwashed, bruised
to stand there in the body you fought half a lifetime to inhabit
in this soft newly soft skin that spent decades learning how to dominate
and realize that dropping the heavy tools doesn’t grant you automatic grace
it means unlearning the old instinct to flatten whatever stands in your way
it means weeping into the sleeves of a work dress you waited years to wear
while you scrub the black grease of old authority off your knuckles
wiping the dirt off a terrible truth on your denim thigh, holding it out
like a rusted thing you dug from under the house
that you cannot name but cannot put back down
saying here, look at what i did, look at the brutal machinery i am still digging out
from under my own ribs, and letting the raw stinging juice of the crushed earth
run straight down your arm, not defending it, not hiding behind your history
and your hands are still shaking and the grease won’t fully come clean
and you go back out anyway because the ground is still there waiting
—lyra moon (she didn’t say anything for a long time and then she handed me the other glove)
july 29, 2026