It’s okay if he’s married.
Well, no. It’s not okay if he’s married.
But this is how love finds you.
Between traumas. Within and around your promise
that you will never be the girl wreathed
in a white dress, beaming.

You don’t beam. But that’s the thing about love.
It doesn’t care about history, or science. Or the red-haired woman
with her own ways of being governed
by her own unswayable heart.

Love teaches you how to love the way the body
teaches itself to heal. And when that fails, there’s medicine.
And when that fails, your friends hold you
till your hands are steady enough.

And you built all of this. You, lit up in a field
of your own making. You, telling yourself Yes,
and daring the universe to do its worst,
and knowing it will, and daring anyway.

You are not your mother’s daughter. You are something entirely new,
a child raising herself so her own children won’t have to.
Tell that to the statistics. Tell that to the scalpel voice
carving into your ear: This will fail. You’ll fail.
You’ll fall. That’s not the same, though.
And you know falling, into bars, bottles and bad decisions,
in and out of legacies, into a home you came to sell
and made instead. You know sometimes the fall
is what the body needs to open, let the sickness out.

And if he dies – and he’ll die. Or you’ll die.
That’s how this works – you raise your children.
Dance with your sisters. Always be fine.
Carry him somewhere unnamed in your anatomy,
alongside everyone you’ve loved and lost
and everything they showed you how to find.