The last time my heart snapped into two,

I didn’t knock at my therapist’s door

Carrying a tote bag to stash its fragile shards

Or greet her with sunflowers like I always did.

A dozen and half times the previous week,

She had told me to open the valves in my heart

And let tears flow till it’s empty and dry.

But I do not.

On nights like today, when the sky is a shade darker than my kohl eyes

and the moon’s gone to sleep

pulling up a warm quill of grey clouds to cover herself,

my heart spills into a hundred Plath poems

and a handful of Shelly’s.

My rusted fingertips,

that last scribbled a yellow letter to my lover

are grief stained- verses of lament, running through each crease

to fill sheets of empty canvas.

My heart feels less cumbersome today

and maybe, I smile- a little.

Tonight, I am feeding myself

a spoonful of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”

and tattooing Dickinson’s “Hope” on my parched epidermis,

cracked and creased.

And when the crickets’ song dies down after midnight

I’ll blast Hozier and Taylor Swift on my earphones

And drown my grief in every rhythm.

I’m taking shelter in art today,

Dipping paint brushes in cobalt blue and burnt umber,

painting Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on my bronze back

And when pink dawn light creeps in through my blindfolds

I’ll wake up between dogeared pages of Morrison and Woolf

And knock at my therapist’s door with sunflowers

Telling her the pieces of my heart are gluing again,

healing in art.