I can watch death take hold and still digest 3 meals a day, 

throw clothes in the machines, put them away in heaps, 

still tumble out with the children in stained pajamas to check 

the mail, sit on the porch as they dig into mud, still help 

with homework and braid hair when the feelings land 

foreign and unlabeled, requiring a probe to sort 

and trace them back to their origins with their blistered 

and bleeding and barely stitched seams embroidered 

with other feelings from other foreign traumas 

I’ve evolved enough to garage.