Plum

We each hold a glass of red wine. You look good in your new sweater. I look good in your big chair acting like I own the place. Both of us winning at a game we never meant to start playing. When I say I’m tired of people who love big but don’t know how to love gentle you say you relate. I think that you probably mean it. In your chest lives a bruised plum with a hard pit. You serve more wine, tell me a story you told me last week, do the dishes, pour out my glass still full. You look good in your new sweater. It makes me linger a minute on the doorstep. It makes me feel your soft hair with my cheek as you hug me goodbye. I pull the plum from your chest into mine. No ceremony: my plum all along, after all. I drive home slow and not longing. Stale snow, half-moon, cigaret smoke on the corner. At home is the cat, she was waiting awake. I tell her I don’t give my heart in pieces. She begs to be fed and I feed her. In my chest lives no plum, just a scared little thing. I light a candle, draw the curtains closed. 

Josie Cressler (she/they) lives in Portland, ME with her three besties. She recently graduated from a small liberal arts college where she studied Religion and Prison Studies. In her free time, she likes to write and make art–often seeking to capture moments of radical self-acceptance within an understanding of societal structures, systems, and cycles that make that hard. Her scholarly texts range from political theory to science fiction to her own middle school journals.  https://www.instagram.com/josie.cressler/

A Song for Josie