Her & The Hairline Fractures

images that represent her written in the poem below

Her tooth is cracked but it’s in the back so you can’t see.

A quiet flaw she keeps like some small private treasure.

Her ends are split but they’re curled up with the illusion of being neat.

Soft spirals hiding damage, overly practiced poise.

Her ballet shoes are delicate and youthful but she has big feet.

Too grown for such small things, a never ending performance.

Her favorite treat is sixty percent cocoa chocolate chips but they are bittersweet—

a taste that lingers longer, never complete or satisfying.

Her thoughts aren’t ever original so she just retweets.

Echoes of another dressed in insight, secondhand but still easy to see.

Her car is old but at least unlike a freshman she doesn’t walk the street.

It grinds like a clock running out, faithful in its tired tires.

Her bird had a weird long name, it was a parakeet.

A fragile thing she named far too grand, then lost to the quiet cold.

Her commute to work is always made late, it shows on her timesheet.

Minutes slipping, stacking losses of money slowly at her feet.

Her perfume is always sickly sweet.

A covering trace that somehow lingers longer before she enters.

She works near every day, her hours folding in on her mediocre sleep.

A life of clocked-in moments she is almost too tired to keep up.

Her cat curls like a question markdown by her discussed big feet.

A velvet witness to the nights she cannot sleep.

She’s from a place of salt and sun where restless ocean heats.

But now she wakes to rayless mountains, air too thin, too clean, and not sweet.

She is a girl divided gently

where two different landscapes meet.