The city doesn’t wake to the sun; it wakes to the grinding of gears.
January seventh.
Minneapolis is a landscape of salt and exhaust,
and Renee is just a mother in a Honda Pilot,
the ink of her own poems still fresh in her mind,

The boots don’t walk, they stomp,
a heavy, rhythmic bruising of the asphalt
under a sky that has forgotten how to be blue.
They arrive in the gray hours,
the color of a storm that never breaks,

I woke up and saw the salt-trails on my pillow—dried maps of a battle I fought while the rest of the world was quiet. It’s heavy, seeing that physical proof of how much I’ve been carrying, but there’s a strange, fierce relief in it, too.