Ploy

“I overheard the man
whisper
"I am a lover
not a fighter,"
and to myself
I thought
I,
am in fact,
both.
For is it love
at all
if it's not worth
fighting
for?”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“I love you,
in ways
you've never been
loved,
for reasons you've never been
told,
for longer than you think you
deserved
and with more
than you will ever know existed
inside
me.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

“eat, baby.
eat.
chew.
please.
I know it hurts. I know it doesn’t feel good.
please.
I know your hunger is different than mine.
I know it doesn’t taste the same as mine.
imagine you could grow up all over again
and pinpoint the millisecond that you started
counting calories like casualties of war,
mourning each one like it had a family.
would you?
sometimes I wonder that.
sometimes I wonder if you would go back
and watch yourself reappear and disappear right in front of your own eyes.
and I love you so much.
I am going to hold your little hand through the night.
just please eat. just a little.
you wrote a poem once,
about a city of walking skeletons.
the teacher called home because you
told her you wished it could be like that
here.
let me tell you something about bones, baby.
they are not warm or soft.
the wind whistles through them like they are
holes in a tree.
and they break, too. they break right in half.
they bruise and splinter like wood.
are you hungry?
I know. I know how much you hate that question.
I will find another way to ask it, someday.
please.
the voices.
I know they are all yelling at you to stretch yourself thinner.
l hear them counting, always counting.
I wish I had been there when the world made you
snap yourself in half.
I would have told you that your body is not a war-zone,
that, sometimes,
it is okay to leave your plate empty.”
― Caitlyn Siehl

“Don't you do that.
Don't you look at what I had for you and call it weak.
Not when you were the one afraid of it.
I stood there with my hands open,
my mouth bruised tender with supplication.
Don't you dare treat me like a victim of my own emotions,
like being moved to my knees by love
was a mistake that I regret.
I will go to my grave with the memory of the bravery in my bones.”
― Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried