Please don’t ask me which
was best— leaving or sitting
in an oak ten feet up.
It was defibrillators primed.
I sat in an unpaved parking lot
under Palmettos and said
NO
for the first time. I could speak.

How many ways can this be said?

I choked on my love for him.
Suffocated. Self flagellated.
I placed the best parts of myself
under his steel toed boot.

I washed his grey. Sanitized it.
Sanitized myself.

No color for me. Black skies
in black shirts over a blackened
and charred heart.

Somehow it still beats.