This Hole We Dig by Joely Williams

"Stone Shovel" © Vevna Forrow

I have been carrying something I cannot name

the way you carry a stone in your coat pocket—

not because you need it,

but because your hand keeps finding it.

We dug this hole together.

You handed me the shovel.

I handed it back.

We took turns.

We called it no one needs to know.

We called it: this is fine,

this is the underground we live in now.

No sleep in weeks.

The secret grows heavier at 3 a.m.

I have learned this:

what you bury in the day

climbs out at night—doesn't matter what

you're sleeping on:

a bed, the streets, the subway seats.

It sits at the end or in a corner

and looks at you.

The graveyard is full of things

I meant to say out loud.

The headstones read:

Almost, and Nearly,

and I thought about it.

I walk through them some mornings

with my coffee.

Secrets are not the thing you hide.

They are the hiding.

They are the shape your body takes

around something it cannot release—

curved, always, toward the thing

you are trying not to hold.

Put down the shovel.

The hole is deep enough.

We have been underground.

Come up.

Come up.

The light is still there.

It has been waiting.

It does not ask where you have been.

ABOUT:

Joely Williams is an Afro-Boricua poet and multidisciplinary artist from the South Bronx, now based in the American South. Her work explores cultural memory, survival, identity, and the weight of inherited grief. Her poetry has appeared in Louder! Poetry Magazine, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, In Parentheses, SISTORIES: Fluid By Nature, POETRY FESTIVAL, and others. She is the author of two self-published poetry collections

POET'S SONG SELECTION: Secrets - Cursing