Release Date: 27 March 2023
In 2022, Amy faced the most challenging decision of her life: stay in the job she knew and loved as a high school English teacher, making a difference in the lives of teens, but continue to risk her relationship with her friends, her family, her health – and her own children?
Or leap into the unknown?
Amy’s choice resulted in these poems, as she processed her way through grief into joy on the other side.
For everyone who knows what it takes to change the world, one baby step at a time – and a reminder to all creatives that changing the world starts first with changing you.
**eBook option includes .mobi for Kindle and .epub for all other apps and readers**
A Teacher’s Fall
Your face never
belonged to me.
I was loaned it
for a while, by
due process and
bureaucratic regard,
never once suspecting
I’d come to regard
it as one of my own.
I fall in love every year.
And it is a fall:
A great gust of wind
sweeping pretence away,
stripping leaves that,
golden though they be,
do little aught but hide
the beauty of the trunk beneath.
It takes five weeks to fall.
And at the end of each year,
I am left, stripped bare and bereft,
a tree removed from a forest
or a forest removed of its trees
breathing air that was intended
to be shared by many sets of lungs.
Winter, summer, spring and fall,
only the annual dance is this:
—a falling—
—a glorious summer of ponder-ful delight—
—then winter, cold and bare.
You do not need me anymore,
and this is right.
One day, my heart will find a spring,
and heal from this annual decay.
A Letter To Myself
No one ever told me healing hurt this much
or if they did,
my heart wasn’t ready to understand:
Healing isn’t the gradual and effortless
knitting together of new skin over open wounds
It’s uncovering a part of your body to realise
that instead of smooth scar tissue,
there’s a wound plugged only with dirt and grit and stubbornness
and the skin around it is inflamed
and that’s why you’ve been aching
aching
aching
Healing is the unstoppering of wounds with foreign bodies
A splinter lodged in your palm that only you can remove
with a sterilised needled gifted to you by a therapist
or a TikTok
or a friend who went through something similar once.
Healing is the placing of a magnifying glass over your soul,
so that you can clearly see the inner structures
of a part of your insides
you never thought would be exposed
to discern which bits are you
and which bits are part of the fabric you were wearing when you fell
And sometimes, you get seasick trying to tell the difference
and so does the nurse assigned to help you.
Healing is plucking gravel, one laborious stone at a time, from your
knee, where you slipped thinking all was well,
when really the footwear you placed your trust in was slick and slippery as sin
And just as charming
And just as impractical for keeping your footing on a slick and slippery slope
Healing hurts far worse
than the numbness that lies beyond exhaustion,
the brain fogog-og—ogog of burnout
when you only realise some years later
that you didn’t just burn your candle at both ends,
you burned it in the middle too, then set fire to the stick
until the whole thing went up in a blaze, engraved with concepts
—like friends
—like family
—like peace
until one day,
the flame burned
out.
Healing is the long, arduous slog up a slope you ran quite quickly down,
led by others who ran before you who never knew,
had never been taught,
that the quickest way to the river that quenches thirst
just beyond the jagged, craggy hills
isn’t to barrel down the slope headlong
until you roll, crashing with broken limbs, into the gully,
and then to haul yourself back up the other side,
but rather to zipline across the gully in the first place
using the wire the clever ones who came before you strung.
But you didn’t know that
And neither did your role models
And so into the gully you ran.
Healing is a journey, fraught with tears and tempers and frustrations;
But, my love—
It took you years to get here.
Why do you keep assuming
it’ll take only weeks to get out?
What a good thing I packed you some water
and a rainbow
and a tiny, happy potato the internet once made.