May 5, 2023 - “Spring has always been here” by Elizabeth Lerman

You smoke with one hand, run the other under the hot water and wonder how long it might take for skin to split this way. You would like something in you to open. You imagine taking a sledgehammer to the walls of your throat, your stomach, your head, all the parts of you that tense and swell with pain or pride or pointlessness. There is already a hole in your heart, you think, and when you breathe you can feel the parts of you that need filling and life is right there, ready to flood the empty space in your sternum, but here, something stops you from swallowing it. Maybe it’s the house and how quiet it is without the two of them, or the way she won’t stop dragging her feet down the halls, maybe even, maybe mostly, it is that spring has always been here but you have never seen it.