your open palms harden into glassy blueness / so frail the drop of an old penny would shatter your entire being :: braided ropes etched into your palms & all of their stray fibers weaving across your humanness / your hands / tell me stories no one else can decipher :: no one else can unweave a spider web with so little destruction / maybe we need more destruction / maybe creation is overrated :: let me take your hands & turn them back to ocean water / flowing back into the clouds because what exists between us is higher than our graves :: what exists between us is the reason we are alive / the way invisible wind blows beauty through yellow fields with thumb-sized flowers :: you give me sunflowers drinking water from a glass vase / petals stripping off into brittle litterfall / drifting out the white-paned window / until all that remains is a black circle / but the color yellow / the shock of yellow / will always stay with me :: my two small hands were not made to be held by yours / but you hold them & turn them back to ocean water :: we shrink into our rib cages until we forget how to let the wind pour in our lungs & so we drown in ourselves / hidden in dark closets that hold all of our traumas :: you tell me you have been broken in every part of you i can touch / from bone along the arch of your spine / beading down to your genetic code :: only you can see my hands are sparkling with blue glitter that spreads to yours & your entire being as i hold you / you don’t know why you’re crying but it’s the most beautiful thing :: once you were a fetus wrapping little fingers around an umbilical cord as you emerged into cold fluorescence / whiteness of floors & walls ::  you had plump little hands as an infant / reaching out for your mother because the first dream you had was rocking on a wooden ship as the whole world was drowning