CALL ME BELOVED

the soles of my shoes catch edges on the sidewalk
and trip me up. along their sides the soft leather
is cracking, pulling away – they need to be replaced
but I’m reluctant to let them go. always I’ve grown
so attached to the least of my possessions, like at
six years old when the mean boy in class gleefully
broke a tiny plaster turtle my mom brought back
from a trip, an inconsequential token I clung to
with a ferocity that even surprised me as a child.

he callously snapped the head clean off the neck and
placed both pieces in my hand, breaking something fragile
within me too – I knew this then, still a child.
people say that childhood ends as quickly as a
single gasping breath – with the sudden terror
of cars colliding or a loved one lying in a casket,
their face is strange and the moment is surreal
and you can’t place why – your eyes blink and then
childhood is over, gone so quickly you wonder
if it was ever really there.

I think it’s much slower, bits and pieces eroded away
by the thousands of stinging blows you carried with you
in your childlike hands, the insults and hard truths
that threatened to pile up and break you, to take the
soft, wooden grain of your innocence – to whittle it down
to toothpicks and callously place them in your upturned palms.

for some reason I hold onto those hurts the same way
I cannot buy new shoes. I’m comfortable in them, and I fixed
the soles with glue – the same way my mother gently pressed
the turtle’s head back onto its tiny painted body, a thin
ribbon of glue forced out from the disappearing crack.