Kintsugi

“What is broken God blesses…”
— Jimmy Santiago Baca

The way my poems come into being:

chop

    py

        snip

              pets
that can flow freely if I listen.

When I find myself disjointed by fragments
stepping lightly to avoid
cracks in the pavement,
I take fluid strings, weave as I sing:
spirit is not trapped in
glass bottles or baptismal fonts –
it lives in the rough-hewn rocky bottoms of streams
silkened smooth by the trip grip
of endless searching feet
worn down on the winding path of time.

There is a grace to blood:
it blooms slow cherries from torn flesh,
down shattered bone.
I remind myself
hole

    holy

        whole
as I clutch half-moon shards
jagged in my chest, bereft –
love child, you can mend them with gold.

You have survived;
the story can be told.
The pieces are still all there –
they connect,
if you turn them just so.

Megan Skelly is an emerging poet completing her final year of the MFA Creative Writing program at City College of New York, where she teaches composition and various writing across the disciplines courses. Her work has appeared in Sixfold, OyeDrum, and the anthology You May Drink From It. Committed to cultivating the arts in education, she also serves as a mentor for CCNY’s Poetry Outreach program and substitute teaches in the NYC public schools. In her free time, she practices and teaches yoga, seeking the balance between freedom and form that poetry too invites.