And you held the night in the palms of your hands
In the lines on the insides of your fingers
And in the creases of your elbows
Sometimes you can still sense little bits of it, there,
Hanging,
Threads of starlight and midnight city air stuck
Under your nails and behind your ears
But when you look in the mirror
It’s a grown-up who looks back,
Haggard, adult,
A woman whose circles under her eyes tell more
Than her cracked lips ever could.
By Betsy Jacobson, 6.2.2011
