Kristen Roles

I am practicing how to hold on longer with a lighter grip.
I look for you still,
You find me when I’m not.
In a mirror, I am looking older,
Out a window, we center the periphery.

Never again would the small things send me reeling, I foolishly
insisted.
But by The Escalator,
I am feeling stalled (which is also to be held in place)

I am feeling held.
(how Impossible, how miraculous, how very human)

I make bridges out of light, ice, ink, and hope the mixed metaphors
hold.

In our popsicle stick home, my best friend’s slim fingers wrap the
diaphragm of your/my tattoo.
The power went out during the hurricane (we only knew because the
popsicles had melted)
But the house stayed put and there was no disaster here.

In traffic on the 26th, someone had scrawled “suicide” through back
window dirt.
Instead, I took another picture of the pond.

Brenda gave birth in November.
More than ever I am stumbling over words, as in photographing the
moon, as in
I live for the coincidences that feel like understanding

Henrietta died last July (“whose hands are these?” she’d been
asking for awhile).

In treading water, where we go to merge horizons and muffle the
echoes,
there is nothing to grip at all.

www.kristenroles.com