Love of Broken Things

by Petra Chambers

David Boca

This feeling will not conform to any size or shape of slot, no matter how firmly I press, breathing cautiously until I hear the click that says it’s locked away.

Loneliness is to be hurried away from, left holding its broken umbrella, long after the last bus carries the residue of multitudes, delivered, sorted, snapped up tight in stacks of boxes, neatly stowed in rows of rooms on dear & tidy squares of streets.

It resists my efforts at containment; vines & twigs & collects its love of broken things until I succumb & let it gather all the splintered parts of me amongst its muddy skirts, almost like a mother.

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Petra Chambers lives in a quarrelsome community on a small island in the Salish Sea. A white settler with a matrilineal line from sub-Saharan Africa and ancestry from the Anglo-Celtic islands, her ancestors all survived long enough to reproduce, though conditions were precarious at times. She has work forthcoming with Pithead Chapel and Queens Quarterly.