Healers have the habit of tending to leprosy in everyone but themselves. I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to be saved. I don’t want to rile up old demons and wounds and burn bridges before I’ve built them.
I’ve swam deserts and wandered until my lungs heaved heavy from breathing heat and converting lost footpaths into highways for someone else to find. I’m sore and spotted as an uncaged ocelot, hiding in a sullied canyon, growling secrets to stones older than the rings of Saturn, asking if there are still pristine things left to discover.
There must be.
Let’s explore the part of you that finds a cave-in concealed from anyone without the secret language to enter. You can whisper open padlocks, rummage up ruins from lost silver cities, unearth doors boarded up from storms long-since passed but warily remembered, their residual terror tattooed in rust. Speak it open in whatever way you imagined conquistadors before you knew better and before you knew memory and before you knew not every heart ached as deeply as yours.
I can glisten good as any fool, and I can hold onto things heavier than you can carry. And the soft of my mouth will leave you bitten and unafraid, cat-eyed and ripping open, burlap sacks of gold coins like a ceiling of stars finally allowed to rest into their next bright night.
I’m not that hard to find. Even healers need healing sometimes.
Kaitlyn Owens is a product manager and poet based in Richmond, Virginia. With roots in Indiana and Tennessee, she writes both formal and free verse poetry exploring family history, identity, and modern relationships. Her work has appeared in Hare’s Paw, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine, and Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, and she is completing her first collection of poetry.