Stillness Between Breaths

A poem for us all.

Artwork by Cameron Matthews.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about breath—not the curated breath of guided meditation, not the wellness-influencer kind of breath, but the raw, reflexive inhale that finds you when you forget to be vigilant. The kind of breath that reminds you you’re still, inexplicably, alive.

We are living in a moment that feels like it cannot possibly be real. The headlines bend toward the absurd: Elon Musk and DOGE, genocides livestreamed in fifteen-second bursts, citizens kidnapped by the government for peaceful protests, your child’s future, your own dignity. There are days it feels like the walls are closing in not from outside forces, but from the pressure of having to care about everything all the time.

I sat by my living room window yesterday morning, not to find peace exactly, but to see if stillness might come if I waited long enough. The city was waking in its usual clamor—delivery trucks groaning at the curb, neighbors arguing over something no longer important. I thought about the lack of effort by Democratic leadership, about how white supremacy has learned new ways to dress itself up online. I thought about Gaza. About Sudan. About trans children, book bans, and the way my chest tightens when I consider how many people are simply trying to survive systems that were designed to destroy them.

And then, somehow a few minutes later, I breathed.

Not because anything had changed. Not because I had reached enlightenment. But because my body demanded it. Because breath, it turns out, is the one ungovernable thing I have.

So I wrote a poem about it.

Stillness Between Breaths

Some mornings I wake
& the headlines taste like copper.
The sky forgets how to be blue.

Today there were missiles.
Yesterday there were mass shootings.
Tomorrow, there will be something else
to make us forget how to swallow
without guilt.

The world is ending
in pieces—
not all at once,
but in the way glass breaks
under the weight of silence.

Today, I read about a boy
shot by someone who mistook
his skin for a question.
A girl taken.
A mother holding a sign that says
PLEASE.

It makes me think of how a body
can be both sanctuary
& target.

Then, I boil water like a prayer,
and play Chet Baker low.
As if the trumpet might tuck the death toll
back into its coffin,
as if jazz could apologize
for the things we do to each other.

I press my palm to my chest
& wait for the rise.
The small lift
of something not yet taken.

I do not know how to stop the loss.
I do not know how to make
this world less cruel.
But I know how to breathe
through a trembling.

To call the space
between breath & breath
a kind of staying.

Maybe that is enough
for today.

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This Thing of Ours is the most personal story I’ve ever written—a novel about loss, love, and what it means to rebuild when everything feels broken. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to start over, for anyone who’s searching for themselves in a world that keeps trying to tell them who to be. If that sounds like you—or someone you love—you can preorder a signed copy from Books Are Magic here. I’m signing each one with the hope that it finds you at just the right time.