Hollow Bones

by Sam Moe

I forget things I swore to protect. I forget what month it is, whether I unplugged all the lights, if the spider outside the door is tending to an egg or a dead bug. Forget your name. How you acted just like him. When I was back home, days were cold and empty. The evening was a wolfspace. If I was sad enough, I would go out to get eaten. Do you know what I mean? The day we argued about my past in the restaurant. How I still dream you’re going to wake up and decide you don’t hate me today. How useless all that sounds, now. Sometimes I ask others about your moods and what you are for breakfast and what you’re listening to these days. You live in my mind in a farmhouse of lies. There are fake horses and every day I tend to the fire. We are past the blood but still broken. We will never see green again or cranes or lilies. I forget what your voice sounded like when not wrapped up in tinfoil. Men explain things to me. Men think they know my body and the format of my teeth and the way my heart skips and whether I like rabbits or birds more. Men, like you hate my words. Hate my ribbons. My stomach, my fingers, my scars, my god, what is the point of us? I didn’t die when I could have. The bathroom was yellow, and it knew why I was in there. The closet hummed as I sifted through drawers for cotton and everything else I needed but couldn’t tell you. Spent months jagged and raw. Climbed in strangers’ cars. Wondered if you’d care if I disappeared. Now I know better. And when the great river heron arrives at my window come dusk, I let her hide me beneath the alula and we slip away into ink and scraps and through white hot wires. Used to think I would die if people didn’t love me. Now I know the terrain of a smooth blue wing and how nothing else, not even if you came crawling, matters. I’m not leaving but I’m not staying. I’m not the girl I once was. Clover pastures. Rainbow bracelets. Gauze. Sobs. Bed of lies. The heron eats rainbow fish in the evening. This poem isn’t about you; nothing ever was.

Sam Moe is the author of eight books. Her most recent poetry collection, RED HALCYON, is forthcoming from Querencia Press in 2026. Her debut short story collection, I MIGHT TRUST YOU, is out from Experiments in Fiction (2025).