it comes to you late one night. not eniterly a thought, or feeling so much as what you know in your skin, your hair. it settles over you quiet and coarse—this sickness without beauty. once had, and sure’d, and known it’s a light you swing around you. A hard arc of sadness and loss built on your mother’s belly & breasts. your father’s slick’d hair and stained shirts. you chase the absence of beauty down a line of blood and see how beauty protects itself from the likes of you and yours. you are not beautiful. you are not granted long simple nights of touch, nor aching hips from unseated passions. you are not welcome here.
you find the lazy eyes of your grandmother in the coldness of your bed. or the pot belly of an uncle, or the worn flesh of a grandfather, are cylinders in an unescapable lock of blood, bone and privilege. beauty protects herself. she waits in the night for more of herself and you lay invisible at her feet. unwanted. unneeded.
and this knowing sits with you long into the emptiness of winter. never leaving. never promising. never relenting. never claiming to be anything more than true.
