I see your pain
and I don’t raise you.
Because I never had to
scrape it from my bones—
the terror of being left
behind
in the rapture.
Give me the hot and crackling
flames.
Spare me
the encircling horizon,
the concave nothingness.
Because I never had to crawl
through thorny bushes,
poison leaves scalding
my skin—
in search of
gunpowder fairy dust
to rip it off of me,
to turn me into
something else.
Because I never had to
take an ax to the wires
in my head. So they stop
plotting. So they stop
sparking. To Kill
To drown. To quench.
To rest.
I had my ration.
The hand would have been
plenty to stay in
some other game.
But I see your hand.
I see your pain.
And I fold.
First appeared in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Issue 20, 2025