Between Ash and Breath

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A sky undecided hangs overhead suspended in that in-between hue that refuses to settle on blue or gray. The day unfolds with a weight that clings to skin and seeps beneath layers while holding itself close; it is too slight to be named yet impossible to ignore. It moves with me.

Along familiar streets, even the wind seems hesitant. There is just the slow groan of metal beneath my shoes, echoing like a city’s reluctant yawn—a subtle murmur of resistance before it stirs awake.

A strip of denim curls around a fence post, sun-bleached, wind-worried and nearly brittle. At first it appears discarded but the longer I look it becomes something else: a fragment, a remnant and a placeholder for someone who once paused there or passed through without leaving much behind.

It’s easy to imagine a moment caught in that very spot—words exchanged, misunderstood, or never spoken at all. Something flickers at the edge of thought—a memory maybe—but it doesn’t land. It backs away before it takes shape. What’s left is a silence that doesn’t empty the space, but fills it. That silence is where the poem Still Breathing begins.

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Still Breathing

by Kerry Ann Wiley

The curb sweats tar in the early gray.
Metal hums beneath the soles—not music, not even rhythm—just the low murmur of something too exhausted to speak.

A strip of denim twists around chain link,
wind-worried and sun-cured to silence.
Whether abandoned or never claimed,
it remains—creased like a jaw clenched mid-answer.

It is not mourning—perhaps merely the damp salt feathering the air—
yet every time the wind shifts left,
bodies flinch right.

Fingernails once bitten
into the shape of a comma,
pausing only when laughter cracked
wide enough to swallow silence whole.

Nothing yields now.
Not the screen door bowed by heat,
nor the floorboards that shift as if listening,
nor the blinds that tremble when nothing moves,
nor the glass pane smudged with a gesture left unfinished,
nor the hands that brushed past skin without finding anchor.

Evenings smear across enamel like ink,
each shadow dragging the scent of something
half-burned and still breathing.
Still breathing.

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The poem doesn’t begin with action—it begins with temperature. With fatigue. The curb sweating tar and the metal humming beneath tired feet feels like a place I’ve walked through before.

Not just physically, but emotionally—those early gray hours when the world is thick with memory and you’re not sure if the weight you feel belongs to now or something that was never resolved.

There’s no narrative here in the conventional sense. Instead, the poem offers fragments—each one purposeful, each one quiet enough to be missed if you’re not already listening.

The denim twisted in the fence becomes a stand-in for what lingers long after the moment has passed. Whether left behind or never claimed, it holds shape the way silence sometimes does: creased and clenched, waiting for someone to notice.

Then the wind shifts left and bodies flinch right.

It’s the kind of detail that reaches beyond the mind and lands in the body. No story is offered, yet one is felt. The flinch needs no explanation—it belongs to a grief that lingers in silence. It belongs to the salt in the air, the pause before a breath, and the instinct that remains long after memory fades.

When the poem turns inward, it finds hesitation pressed into skin. Fingernails bitten into the shape of a comma speak of what was held back, chewed on and worried into silence. That image, a pause etched into flesh, is a quiet act of survival. Then laughter breaks through; it isn’t the kind that heals but the kind that splits something open just long enough for stillness to return.

What follows isn’t just silence, but space. Rooms appear—familiar, as if waiting. A house where nothing quite lines up, where every object holds its own small weight. The blinds tremble without wind. The floor shifts not from footsteps but from memory. The screen door warps under heat. The window bears a smudge from a gesture that never quite connected. Even the hands, when they brushed against skin, passed through without landing.

The house doesn’t forget. It absorbs.

Then evening arrives, subtle and insistent, like ink quietly darkening an untouched page. Shadows merge with a bitter trace of char, while the air clings to a residue—not of flame, but of something that stubbornly persists.

The final line doesn’t rise. It remains.

Still breathing.

Not for a reason. Not in protest. Just because. Because not everything ends when it’s supposed to. Some things—some people—keep going because they don’t know what else to do.

They persist between ash and breath, just beyond what can be named.

And in that residue—faint as smoke, weightless as absence—something endures. Not a flame, not a pulse, but the trace of both. A presence felt only in the pause, the tremble, the way a room forgets to echo once the sound is gone.