for the fighters
In college, in the middle of Kansas, I learned from glorious
women. They draped buzzing August classrooms in kindness,
in gravity, in the grace of all their words and truths. We knew
just one part of each other, but it was a sacred, vaulted part—
the part of our words upon our papers, our voices resting
one atop the other. So when my professor handed us the old quote
“To keep passing open windows”, to carry our hope amidst all
the darkness in our pens and hearts, I listened. I did not forget.
In the hospital, in the hardest August of my life, I walked past
windows full of light. My neck was tight with black stitches
splitting and gathering my wounded skin as I worked until the sun
went down, rushed to the hospital between jobs, learned life doesn’t
wait for you to heal before it takes another swing. And so, alone on a
still, blank hospital floor, I realized this is loving past open windows: to
stitch your life together even as the thread is ripped away, to cry your
agonies without reservation beneath a thousand different skies, and to
stand up at the microphone anyway—no matter how hopeless; no matter
how heartsick or hemorrhaging.
And if love is the ballad before the horror, love is the ballad after it—
the open windows and the sun beyond them, the breeze as you lean on
the sill, the words carved into the wood, the courage to keep walking
and knowing the bravest thing we can do is speak our grief before the
heavens. Love, I think, is the women who taught me to gather my storm.
In my dreams, I am in the bright gallery. Love fills the room from
floor to rafter. At the mic, I rub pearl dust and mercy on my eyelids.
I crush lightning and love on my lips.
—
Catherine Strayhall is a nerdfighter from Kansas City and a former assistant editor for Poets Reading the News. A two-time winner of the Sullivan Poetry Award at Kansas State University, her work has appeared in The Kansas City Star. This poem is included in her debut poetry collection Dress Me Like a Prizefighter (Spartan Press, 2024).
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