Angela Segredaki
Calving
It wasn’t one day
no dam gives way at once, no iceberg falls alone.
Hairline fractures learned the language of silence
long before the white necropolis knelt to salt water.
I learned where limits live in the body:
how love becomes tears with nowhere left to go
how promises rust through and grow brittle
how the heart becomes uninhabitable.
I believed in mitigation
windmills patient at the river’s edge
words storing light the way jars keep peaches
summer stacked for winter on a windowsill.
But weather multiplied in the house:
your anger warmed the room
my fear warmed it more
until frames bent, the doors forgot themselves
and the air grew too thick for lungs.
I charted myself like a coastline
blue lines erasing what used to be land:
the laugh I wore the way water wears stones
the softness I evacuated
as cities retreat from the tide.
Outside, the world was also leaving itself.
Permafrost unlearned its vows.
Peat released its centuries of dark sentences.
Birds redrafted the air.
Smoke inked cursive on the horizon.
I understood at last
that hope without action burns
fuel dressed as future
and chose the cold, exact truth:
love had grown past its basin
and would not go back inside its banks.
Papers are thin things, late-season ice
but the sound of signing is a calving
thunder in the fjords of memory.
Now I walk under a careful sun
learning what grows after fire
testing green on the ash-coloured ground.
Somewhere between the planet’s fever
and my own cooled breath, I say:
we are not punished
we are answered