[This week’s prompt for our weekly writing circle with incarcerated women was so powerful, I decided to share my own fast-write from it here. The two pieces from ‘inside’ writers I recently posted can be read at writinginsideVT]

I lean into the heart of words
intent on catching
their struggling sense,
grasp from them the chaos
of whirling white

thick blossomed spice
she who loves peonies
bedded in their petaled midst
lost in a lingering
swallow of sweetness.

I fall, aflame with surprise,
crumple slowly to ground
affirmed, this lostness a life of its own.
I sink. I rise. I wing onward, loop back
swoop and lean, attend to this moment
both lost, and found.

swb