Free

When I was a child
the door would open like a mouth.
He would come in,
filled with his day's failures,
hands already curled
into the shape of my body.

No one teaches you
how to carry the weight
of a man who can't carry his own.
So I learned how to make myself small.
How to live underwater and not drown.

The day they took him away,
birds went on singing.
I sat in the grass
and felt nothing.
The sun pressed gently down
in place of the apology
he'll never give me.

And I breathed.