Mallet & Bloom
My heart became tender
with the mallet of grief and grace.
Not shaped by silence,
but by every echo I tried to bury
and called strength.
Shaped on an anvil
made of storms I never named.
On the spine
of unfinished apologies
that still know my posture.
Each crack,
a lesson.
Each bruise,
a doorway.
opened to the ache of others.
Ash fell like lullabies
on the fields of my chest.
And the wind,
once full of knives,
learned to touch me
without asking for blood.
Moons slept in my throat,
whispering languages
made of salt.
I walked barefoot through mirrored forests
where every branch remembered
a name I forgot.
I drank from a rusted cup,
still warm from the sun that left
without notice.
The stone in my stomach dissolved into soil,
and wildflowers,
uninvited,
grew softly along my ribs.
Grief wore the mask of a lion
but laid its head in my lap.
Now silence sits beside us.
I stay
just to listen.
Dayanna Almeda is a poet based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work explores intimacy, memory, chronic illness, resilience, and the emotional terrain of survival through precise imagery and sensory detail. This is her first submission to a literary press.