CALL ME BELOVED

I am twenty-two streetlamps,
sodium-vapor orange spotlights
counting the way back home –

I am the home that never was one.
Warm comforts were made, or found,
but never a room for me in the heart
of those timbers, that steel –
windows rattling in hurricanes –
they never broke, until they did

I am what remains, what’s left
after everything I gave away –
much easier to be pecked apart
like blue jays at the bird feeder
feasting on their entitlements
with a calm show of force, bullies
belied by cornflower feathers

I am what couldn’t break, so
it bent, it crumpled, it folded,
I took the branding iron
and held it against my own skin,
I’ll accept all of the sin
so others need not carry it,
I like the weight. It sits
heavy across my shoulders
like my father’s duster,
lost once I left it behind –

rounding a corner, cowering
quiet in the backseat, counting
streetlights silently in my head –
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…