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as thin as breath, and fragile, my hands always straining to keep the fibres intact, and choosing the thinnest needle, and the sharpest—still, the piercing has to happen, perhaps you read that as ‘pain’, it fits.
it fits.
the threat of a tear, a rip to what is almost a memory—how to leave a beautiful mark on something that has seen a life?
many lives?
how to save a thing from being discarded—many things, has been a life for me.
i have always scratched in the dirt for scraps that others might never see.
magpie.
always hopeful that i might take one thing and turn it into something else, something beautiful.
i think it’s why i know what grace tastes like.
also, this might be the story of ‘someone’—a soft body, the piercing, or rather, the pain, but then, after a little while, the beauty.

© Liezel Graham 2025

we fear the thing that causes pain, yet that is where we are changed, turned inside out, given a new beauty, different, but never less.

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