THE CUT

A poem about what does not close

Image from Nimila’s original prompt

Something ruptures, lingers, never fully closes

You brought the steel of the law,

into a wooden room of hushed voices

At ten years old,

I watched you trim away my identity

with steady hands

✄---------

You did not prune for growth,

you cut to claim

✄---------

A parent on paper

handling my life like a document

to be edited at your will

✄---------

My name fell away,

a sound you refused to carry forward

✄---------

You wanted smoother lines

History shaved clean of its edges

A child tailored into something,

that required fewer questions

✄---------

But you only marked the surface

Beneath it,

the root held

And even now,

the warmth in the weather,

opens it all again

✄---------

Concrete dust

Stale smoke

A garage holding more truth

than anywhere else

✄---------

A train behind the house

moving through silence

like a line drawn and erased

✄---------

And her

My sister with scissors,

the only blade I ever trusted

✄---------

Our own ceremony

✄---------

Nothing sharp about it then

Only the slow falling,

of what did not stay

✄---------

Surrounded by out-of-season holidays

Bags of stone

Laughter bending instead of breaking,

in our dark humor

✄---------

We spoke in fragments

small enough to carry

Making some peace with the pieces

✄---------

Always so sure of yourself,

even as a kid

Shearing your own hair

like practice

Then mine

✄---------

Each pass deliberate

Each strand falling,

as if choosing to leave

✄---------

Not just a cut,

a revival

✄---------

For a moment,

we were children again

✄---------

Not untouched,

but unafraid

✄---------
What you did was not taking

It made space

It was medicine

✄---------

Then came another opening

I could not refuse

Bright

Clinical

Seven layers parted,

under careful hands

✄---------

Me lying beneath the light,

heart nearly louder than the thought

✄---------

Let us live

✄---------

A cut felt in pressure

Held breath, then sound

Proof

✄---------

Everything changed shape

We made it

✄---------

What was taken from me returned as

Everything

My son

My daughter

My Sun and Moon 𖤓 ☽

✄---------

The mark remains,

But it was not a loss,

It was a rearrangement

A heart multiplied and moved outside

✄---------

A door

I would walk through again,

without hesitation

✄---------

And then

with wounds still new,

my sister was gone

all at once

out of sequence

✄---------

Another cut that would not close

✄---------

Not clean

✄---------

Small and large, repeating

Shaping everyday

Life moving through the bleeding anyway

✄---------

My father, gone for years

here again, so briefly

We held what we could of each other

across what had changed

after too long away

✄---------

For a moment,

not repair

Just presence

Enough to recognize

Enough to feel

✄---------

Then he was gone, too

Not continuation

Not release

✄---------

A final cut

No motion in it

✄---------

Grief does not resolve

it wears

it returns

It opens the same place

again and again

✄---------

I carry them like this

in lines that do not end

They stay with me

and speak

✄---------

I have known THE CUT

as control,

as ritual,

as opening,

as loss

✄---------

I am what was cut into me

---

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Oof. I appreciate you sitting with me through this piece. It was written in response to the endlessly wonderful Nimila the Inferno’s prompt you can find here.

Thank you for being here.

Until next time,

j

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