Soft Ruin
Inside the chrysalis,
the body begins by forgetting itself.
Muscles loosen its faithful grip.
The old mouth dissolves.
Legs surrender their labor.
Even the patient architecture of hunger
is taken apart until nothing remains,
but a pale, breathing hush where
certainty once lived.
Metamorphosis.
As if becoming were gentler than this.
From within, it is a slow flood,
each familiar room of the body
filling with a void,
each remembered shape softening
into something that can no longer hold its own name.
There is no applause for a miracle.
Only surrender.
I know something of that,
my whole life in shackles.
There are lives we do not leave behind;
they dissolve around us until the person
who first entered them exists only
in fragments,
drifting beneath the surface
like leaves returning to dark water.
I did not choose to change.
I simply grew grew beyond the borders
that once held me, and the world,
faithful to its own turning,
never paused long enough
for my roots to understand
they were no longer touching earth.
So I taught myself the quiet ways of unmaking.
How to loosen my grip without failure.
How to survive the long country of shapelessness,
where every morning arrives wearing a stranger’s face,
and even hope must learn to move without wings.
Yet hidden inside the ruin,
a small congregation of living cells
keeps its impossible promise,
building what the breaking could never imagine.
Perhaps that is what grace has always been:
not escaping the undoing,
but discovering that the deepest part of us
was never asked to dissolve.
May Garner is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for fifteen years and sharing her work online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Her work has appeared in more than seventy literary magazines and anthologies. She is the recipient of first place in the 4th Annual Poet-It Like Poe Poetry Contest and a winner of the 2026 Woody Barlow Poetry Contest. Find her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).
