The Girl In The Photo Album

She wears
her Say Cheese smile,
as if the joy of childhood
could be conjured
like a spell.

Hair tied back in a ponytail,
dress smoothed by careful hands,
as if order
could keep shadows away.

She doesn't know
how brave she is
to be sitting still
with all that storm
burning behind her eyes.

I look at her now
with the ache of knowing.
Not just the way her nights
grew long and heavy,
but how she kept walking anyway—
to school, to friends,
into the wide, bewildering years ahead.

If I could,
I would reach through
the gloss of that photograph,
take her hand,
and tell her
that none of it
was ever
her fault.

 

What Healing Looks Like

It’s not a sunrise.
Not a clean break,
or a song swelling
in the third act.

It’s smaller than that.

It’s saying No
without apology.
A touch on the shoulder
that doesn't feel like danger.
Or sleeping through the night,
just once, and calling it a win.

It’s learning
that I can hurt
and still be whole,
and that my past
doesn't own
the rest of me.

 

Because of You

We never recognize
the exact moment
when life bends its path.
A subtle turn,
like wind shifting leaves
when no one is looking.

But when I trace
the arc of mine,
I see your hands on the wheel,
your voice in the silence,
your laughter stitching torn places
I thought would never hold again.

You couldn’t erase my storms,
but you showed me
how to walk through them—

broken, yes,
but still beautiful.

I stand differently now,
rooted and steady,
because your presence
taught me how.

And if tomorrow scatters us
to separate horizons,
know this:

your mark will not fade.
You are written into me,
woven into the person
I’ve become.

—

For my dear friend J, who changed everything

 

On Faith

Long ago,
stars were angels,
or lanterns hung by God
Thunder was His voice.
Raindrops His tears.
And I believed.

Now I know too much.

Quarks and constants,
probabilities and spin—
we’ve charted the heavens
and found no throne.
We’ve cracked the sky open
and found no face
behind it.

I have learned
how the universe folds itself,
how light bends,
how time slips.
I know
how cells divide,
how thoughts flicker in the brain
like static.

And yet—
some part of me still kneels
before the mystery,
not out of ignorance,
but awe.

Maybe God
is not the answer,
but just the presence
in the knowing.

And maybe faith
isn't belief at all,
but just the part of me
that's too human
to let go.

 

Sometimes I Cry in Parking Lots

It's just a sudden snap
of memory,
a voice that echoes
from nowhere.

I release the breath
I've been holding
since aisle six,
when that song played,
or a stranger's hand
brushed too close.

The past barges in,
brutal and loud,
invisible and raw.

So I sit,
windows fogging,
hands trembling on the wheel,
hoping no one can see me
while the storm passes
through.

Then,
I start the car,
fix my face in the mirror,
and drive home
before the ice cream melts.

 

Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor

When the world grows heavy,
I sit at the bench
and let my fingers speak.

The first note wraps around my heart,
and something within me unfurls.

Weight slips from my shoulders,
falls through the cracks
between black and white.

The keys don’t ask
what I’m carrying.
They just take it.
Hold it.
Echo it back
like an old friend.

Sound waves gather around me,
forming shapes that tell
my story.

I close my eyes,
let the tears come,
and there is only
chord,
melody,
counterpoint.

Music holding me together
when nothing else can.


---

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 was his final piano sonata – a work of fierce intensity and transcendent calm. The first movement storms with weight and struggle; the second, a theme and variations marked "Arietta," unfolds with lyricism and profound stillness. In it, melody, harmony, and counterpoint become a conversation between suffering and release. It's one of my favorite pieces to play, and the second movement always makes me cry.

 

Survivor’s Guilt

Why am I still here?

The question wakes with me.

I was there too,
long ago.
A dark room.
A locked door.
Hands that weren’t supposed to hurt.

But through the cracks,
like a weed or a miracle,
somehow I grew.

Now I walk among ghosts.
Friends lost to needles,
or bottles,
or bullets,
and their own exhausted hearts.

I carry their stories with me,
not because I earned my escape,
but because I didn't.

Some nights, the air tastes like guilt.
It whispers:
Why not you?

There is no answer.
Only the quiet ache
of living
when they could not.

--

https://beckypoems.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-circle.html

We lost one today. Another young life cut short. I didn't know her well, but I know her pain all too well. 

 

Shadows in the Mirror

It's not the memory
that hurts the most.
It's the way
I still blame myself
for surviving it.

I shrink in mirrors,
hide from a face, a body
that never feels
safe to own.

I tell people I'm fine,
a lie I’ve practiced
until it sounds
almost true.

They smile,
and I wonder
what they'd think
if they knew
what was done to me.

And how much of me
still feels ruined.

 

Fire

I remember your hand.
How it moved
like it had a right
to anything it touched.

You smiled,
called it a game.
And I was so young,
I thought not screaming
was some kind of strength.

Everyone loved you.
You fooled them all.
You laughed too loud,
hugged too long,
said things
that didn't sound like warnings
until later.
So much later.

I didn't know I wasn't safe
in my own home.
My own skin.
My own bed.

Now, when I say your name —
and yes, I still say it —
I say it with fire in my throat.
I spit it back at you
like a curse.

I am not yours.

I never was.
You took nothing
I did not take back
with blood,
with grief,
with the years
you don't get to have.

You thought the little girl
would stay quiet and small.

But she grew up.
She walks ahead of you now,
broken, yes,
but unashamed.

And when she looks back at you,

her eyes
burn.

 

Symphony #9

Not grief, really.

But something like standing
in the doorway after
everyone has gone home.

The room still warm
with their laughter,
chairs askew,
glasses of wine
half empty on the table.

You listen,
not for music,
but for what it leaves behind.

A kind of silence
that presses gently
on your ribs,
reminding you
that you're alive,
and won’t be
forever.

 

After the Crying

Mom didn't say much on the way.
I think she was just trying
not to cry.

The lady at the police station
asked too many questions,
but she had a voice like a lullaby,
and held my hand when the tears wouldn't stop.

Her office smelled like flowers
and lemon wipes.
Everything looked clean.
I still felt dirty.

Words like
forcible,
coercion,
age-of-consent
were thrown around.
I didn't know
what they meant.

They gave me a cup to pee in.
Said it was just a test—
just in case.
I didn't know what it was for.
I do now.

A nurse told me I was brave,
while they poked and prodded
in places I don't talk about.
I didn't feel brave.
They said it was for "evidence,"
like my body was a crime scene
wrapped in yellow tape.
I just wanted it to be over.

When we got home,
my room looked exactly the same—
stuffed bear on the bed,
stickers on the mirror,
Taylor Swift posters on the wall.
But I didn't know how to be
that girl anymore.

So I just curled up under my covers
and cried
and waited
to feel
like me
again.

I'm still waiting.

 

What I've Learned So Far

Maybe I haven't lived long enough
or hard enough
to know what life is really about.
But I've stood in the quiet
where a sunrise starts to mean something,
and laughed and cried in parking lots
for no reason at all.

They say wisdom comes with age,
but sometimes it feels like
it's hiding in the pauses,
in the missed calls,
in the pain of letting go.

Maybe life is
just a string of almosts,
tied together by people
who sit with you in silence
while you cry;
or maybe it's about
becoming the kind of person
who can carry both hope and doubt
without needing to explain either.

I don't have answers,
just questions that grow with me.
But I think that's okay, for now.

Doubt Spiral

I can't be here,
alone with my thoughts.

I thought I was fine until I wasn't,
and I don't know when it started.

Maybe it was that look
or the silence
or maybe nothing at all
just a flicker in my brain
like a switch i didn't touch
and now it's all unraveling

what if i'm wrong what
if i've always been wrong what if
everyone knows i'm wrong and they're
just too kind to say it or too tired
of me falling apart or too far
away or too gone and i
shouldn't be here and i shouldn't
have said that and i shouldn't
have done that and my
chest is full of bees just making
noise too much noise in
my head all the voices are
shouting at all the other voices and
i can't make them stop
and if i'm so fucking smart why
can't i figure out how to control
my own brain

i'm unraveling
and i'm trying to breathe but i can't
the air slips away like everything else
i'm so sorry i'm so scared i'm so scared of everything

and i don’t know how
to stop
falling

 

Page 43

The numbers won't stay still.
They shimmer, then scatter,
like ants when you lift a stone.

I read the same line
four times. Maybe five.

The pencil is too loud.
My heart is louder.

My mind replays it again.
It was years ago.
It was yesterday.

I keep pretending the lamp
is enough light.

Tell myself the shadow
is just the chair.
That I didn't hear the door.
The breath.
The footsteps.

He isn't here.
He never is.

He always is.

Common Thread

They came by different roads.

For one, an alley behind a dumpster,
footsteps that weren't hers;
the other on cotton sheets,
still warm from sleep.

Both slipped through a veil
that blurred everything behind it.
Now the night lives with them,
sometimes quiet, never gone.

They do not speak of it,
not often, not plainly.
But there's a flicker in their eyes
when stories stray too near,
the way the air thickens
around the word safe.

When the weight returns —
and it always does —
they show up.
A hand on a coffee cup,
a shoulder just close enough,
no words needed.

Soft, but strong,
a common thread
that holds,
the way friendship does
when built from the stuff
that broke them.

Because just being there
is not the same as
been there.

 

My Grandfather’s Hands

They weren't delicate,
knuckles knotted like old oak roots,
nails rimmed with blackened edges
of soil or engine grease.

In the morning they smelled of cedar,
split logs, and the faint ghost
of wood smoke carried in
after an early frost.

Strong when they needed to be,
but soft enough to wipe my tears like snowflakes,
or cradle an injured bird that crashed
against the kitchen window.

He never prayed out loud,
but his hands —
threading softly through my hair,
or brushing sawdust from a beam —
always moved with reverence,
like they were touching God.

 

Homesick

Seagulls cry
as the sun sinks into the Pacific,
fire reflected
in shattered glass.

I don't know how to be here.

I whisper your name,
pretend there's not
a continent between us.

For just a moment,
your absence feels 
like something I can hold.

It starts to rain.

 

The Nice Lady On The Plane

I'm trying to disappear
into the window.

Beside me, the nice lady
with hair like frost on lilacs
touches my arm,
like a mother might.

She doesn't ask why —
doesn't need to.
You don’t cry that way
unless you’ve left someone
who held your soul in his hands.

She just places her hand on my arm
with the calm of someone
who's seen love leave,
and still return.

We sit that way
watching clouds
and memories,
and breathing feels
just a little less
like breaking.

 

Westbound, Part 2

Goodbye
lingers at the gate,
like smoke after a fire.
Your arms surround me,
warm and safe

but slipping, slipping,
like the last light of dusk
fading into night.

Three thousand miles
is just a number,
until I try to cross it
with a kiss,
a hand outstretched
into air that no longer holds you.

Two years is a long shadow
I'll learn to live inside.
Wading through seasons,
marking days
with text messages,
with phone calls,
with stars we promise
to look at together.

This isn't forever,
just a slow unwinding of now —
a long pause
between heartbeats,

this last unfolding,
becoming
what I'm meant to be.

I won't stop loving you.

 

Westbound

Boxes packed,
stacked like monuments.
He takes my hand —
a ring, a promise,
not goodbye.

Tomorrow I chase the horizon,
heart torn between a dream
and a love I never dreamed
I'd find.

Westbound for now,
but not gone.

I'll find my way home.

 

Friendship, Glue, and Popsicle Sticks

In sixth grade we built
tiny houses out of popsicle sticks
and glue that dried
cloudy on our fingers.
Kat always made hers straight,
windows level, roofs that held.
Mine leaned,
walls like crooked teeth,
but she said they had
character.

We spent hours after school
with cardboard and scissors,
planning whole cities —
bridges, signs,
little paper gardens.
She let me name the streets.

Then That Thing happened —
the Terrible Thing.
And I stopped talking,
stopped building.
The glue dried up in the bottle.

Friends drifted away
like balloons let go.
Some didn't know,
and were too scared to ask;
others just stopped
coming around.

But Kat stayed.

She sat with me,
while I wrote poems
and crumpled them up
without reading them.
She never asked me
to be the same.
Didn't pretend
not to notice
how I flinched
at everything.

I forgot who I was
for a while.
But she never left.

Now, we drive past
neighborhoods with
perfect little porches,
and she reminds me
about those popsicle stick
houses we used to build.

And I come unglued.

She still holds me together,
like she's trying
to keep
a house
from falling.

 

Just As I Am

I'm not easy to love,
in case you didn't notice.

I cry without warning,
feel the hurt before the reason,
carry alarms that won't stop ringing.

My heart folds in strange ways,
marked with bootprints
that aren't yours.

I hold tight to old ghosts,
fear what I should embrace,
and I know that hurts you sometimes.

I'm sorry.

I'm stubborn,
wander through mazes
I've built myself to stay lost.

And still, you love me.
Even when I hide from your light,
even when my tears
can't explain themselves.

You just hold me
as I am.

And for that,
I am quietly,
wildly
grateful.

 

What's Wrong?

Nothing...just tired.

Because how can you explain
this unexplainable clanging
in your head.

to someone who holds you
like a lullaby?

 

Quantum Physics Is Weird

A blur of probabilities
wrapped around protons,
kaleidoscope of eigenstates
under Schrödinger's veil.

No orbit –
not like planets,
or moons tugged by gravity.

Emits no light,
sheds no energy,
can't spiral inward,
nowhere to fall.

Bound not by friction
but Pauli exclusion,
Heisenberg haze
in quantized spacetime.

Superpositioned system
in perfect obedience
to the weirdness of laws
we've yet to unravel.

 

Trafficked, Part 2

She came back
with silence in her throat.

No chains now,
only soft breezes
threading her hair.

She does not speak
of the place she left,
but plants things
that grow
deep roots.

Freedom
is not loud,
but it's hers.

--

Part 2 of a series
Part 1 is here: https://beckypoems.blogspot.com/2025/02/trafficked.html