The blue sky cuts through the world.
I haven’t been myself lately, tethered

by gravity and the weight of my bones.
I catch my heart and reign it in.

Wood fire smoke from the bakery
enters my lungs, in and in and in.

I shut my eyes and see a bonfire,
see the shadows of my past life

crowding around the flames, singing.
Something inside me is burning.

In the sparks and ash, the unmaking
of molecules. I don’t know what will be

made of me tomorrow, limbs sore
after lifting what I haven’t yet learned

to carry. Reshaping around the weight.
Grief is a heavier weight than a loaded

barbell. Hands curling in a stiff grip,
skin thickening into calluses.

I haven’t learned to name the ache,
to pin its face to a mirror. I refuse

the reflection of my body in the glass.
There is a person in my body

throbbing on the ground, dissipating
like smoke. I unfurl into sweat on a mat.

I grow solid as sinew. Here I am
just a body: salt-iron-carbon-water.

And I have been afraid of the truth.
Above me, wisps of cloud against a bright

nothing. I forget to see my self beyond
my body, beyond the mirror of the world.

Perhaps I can learn to be remade this way –
giving in to the slow hot exhale of breath

releasing what has held me in the dark,
inhaling fresh grief, dewy with dawn.

I open my eyes to the skin of the sky
blue and radiant, a gathering of light.

Blue like a place I knew once –
transient as time, shifting as twilight.

Kaya Ortiz

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HEM: In conversation with Kaya Ortiz