Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

Not when the sky is perfect,
not when fear has folded,
but in the half-light of trembling hands
you strike the first small sound.
A single nail into the wall
holds up a future--quiet, stubborn--
and the room remembers how to echo.

Make it happen: whisper it to the marrow,
to the hollow places that learned to stay small.
Feed it with plain tools: coffee at dawn,
a list, two breaths, the courage to begin again.
Build like someone who knows how to heal--
one careful stitch, one stubborn seam,
until the garment fits your living skin.

There will be storms that practice drowning,
voices that map the route of retreat.
Let them pass like weather. Plant your feet
in the soil you've chosen; let roots answer the rain.
Remember the river does not wait for permission;
its insistence carves mountains into maps.

Make it happen not by grandness alone
but by the patient geometry of doing:
small acts, fierce as sunlight through blinds,
pieces gathered until a shape is formed.
Call your fear by name and set it to work;
teach your doubt to carry stones.

When the night asks if you are tired,
say yes--and then say still--go on.
Because making is a kind of mercy:
to yourself, to the people who will warm themselves
at the fire you started with trembling hands.
Make it happen. Let your life be proof
that a single, certain step can become a road.

They sell paradise in glossy pages--smiles laminated,
palm trees like friendly swords, sunsets edited for perfection.
We fly in like moths to a neon mothership,
carry our quiet in hard-sided suitcases, check it at the gate.

The first day tastes like champagne and permission:
salt on our lips, strangers' hands that feel like borrowed warmth,
laughs clipped to camera shutters, promises stamped with sunscreen.
Under the boardwalk, the sand is a slow crowd applauding our forgetfulness.

Night blooms fluorescent--cocktail umbrellas like tiny flags of surrender.
We toast to freedom and call it courage when we swallow our doubts.
The bar keeps our names in receipts and our voices in the grout;
arguments rehearse themselves between the ice and the ashtray.

Affection is a hotel key--glossy, easily lost,
left in pockets with cigarette butts and consolation candies.
We trade apologies for sunsets, make bargains with the tide:
I'll pretend I don't hear, if you pretend you won't leave.

The tide takes everything it can--rings, notes, a pair of sandals--
leaves behind broken shells that gleam like accusations.
Morning arrives with a hangover of cheap perfume and cheap talk,
and the ocean keeps its secrets in the white foam it spits back.

We return sun-kissed and hollow, souvenir shops full of calm lies:
magnets that say "Wish you were here" and postcards for shame.
The pictures are sharp; the memory corrodes--soft edges at first,
then a slow rust that eats the frame until the smile is just a question.

Toxic vacations: sugar-coated fractures, postcards sealed over breaks.
We pay in credit cards and borrowed courage, counting sunsets like a debt.
Yet next year the brochure arrives, glossy new, humming like a temptation,
and we fold up the map of our better selves to fit inside a carry-on.

Sometimes the cure is small and brutal: unpack, open each pocket,
and let the sand sift like truth--grain by grain, it finds the floor.
Sometimes the lesson is mercy: a bruise that fades beneath a different sun.
But most often we keep the tan and pack away the ache,
book another flight and call the wound "a story worth remembering."

We unclasp the small, rusty bones of yesterday--
fingers tasting the cold iron of old promises,
and lift them like explained maps,
learning at last the names of our wounds.

Sun arrives as a patient witness,
burning the thin varnish of fear.
It finds the places where we hid our voices
and stains them gold; the songs spill out
like water from a cracked pot, generous and surprised.

There is a language that only unshackled feet speak:
the soft percussion of steps that do not ask permission,
the hush of breath that no longer counts its cost.
We trade the grammar of survival for an accent of daring,
and the world, for once, listens.

Liberation is not a single door opened;
it is the rustling of rooms within us,
the slow uncoiling of a bird's wings after winter,
the way a river remembers the sea and rushes toward it.

We plant our names in places that once forbade them,
root them deep as anchors and light as prayers.
Hands that trembled learn the shape of holding--
not to grasp, but to offer: food, truth, forgiveness.
Laughter becomes the currency of mornings.

And when the old gates fall--no clatter, only a wind that carries away the last lock--
we step through with pockets full of small, ordinary brave things:
a child's first clear question, an apology that reaches across a table,
the courage to say I was wrong, I am learning, I will stay.

Freedom tastes like a door left open at dusk,
like salt on lips after long, earnest travel.
It is not spotless. It bears the scab of every healed cut,
the history of every hand that pushed and did not relent.
It asks patience, vigilance, the willingness to repair.

Still, once unbound, we move: a sea of soft uprisings,
a chorus of feet, of seeds, of promises, of truth.
We become the small miracles we were taught to fear:
unafraid of light, unafraid of loss, unafraid to be tender.

Tonight the stars seem nearer, as if on purpose.
We lay our maps on the grass, trace new lines with bright, stubborn fingers,
and name the places we will not leave to shadows.
Liberation is the work of living whole, of being honest with our hands.
It is the music we finally allow ourselves to dance to.

There is a light beyond your window--thin, impatient,
like someone who has walked all the way here and won't wait.
The couch holds the shape of your evenings,
the kettle remembers every ritual,
but the world outside is an untied shoelace,
asking to be knotted into your next step.

Get out for more than air. Go for weather that argues with your bones,
for streets that whisper names you've never answered,
for alleys that fold themselves into secret rooms of sky.
Leave the small map you've learned by heart;
there are countries of sound and color waiting
with passports made of possibility.

Take the day that smells of wet cement and coffee,
take the night that tastes of streetlight and song.
Practice a courage that isn't loud--just steady,
the kind that eases your hand into the pocket of the universe
and finds a coin bright enough for a new beginning.

You will be awkward at first--two left feet at dawn,
fumbles at sidewalks, laughter that arrives early and stumbles.
That's how growth arranges itself: imperfect, insistently human.
You will also meet people whose names are warm like bread,
whose stories leak light into your marrow.
You will learn the language of cats and trains,
and the grammar of getting lost and then returning.

If fear is a locked door, curiosity is the long key--
it slides and clicks and finally turns.
Do not deny yourself the thrill of an unlocked life.
Collect small proofs: a sunset that makes you weep for nothing,
a stranger who becomes a memory you can slot into your bones,
a map smeared with coffee stains and yeses.

Return sometimes, but do not live in the doorway.
Carry the landscape inside you: the hush of the sea at three a.m.,
the honest glare of a noon market, the hush of someone's prayer.
Let those places teach your hands new ways to hold the world.

Get out for more than scenery. Go for the story you haven't told yet,
for the song you pretend you can't sing, for the truth that trembles
beneath your usual answers. Step until your shadow lenoers
and the horizon learns your name.

When you come back, bring the weather with you--
damp courage, bright wonder, wind-dusted teeth of laughter.
Set them on the table beside your old routines
and watch how the house rearranges itself
to let in a life that finally remembers to breathe.

It is not forged in stadium lights alone--
it is hammered in the hush before dawn,
when the city is a slow exhale
and feet find rhythm on an empty road.
It learns the language of early mornings,
the grammar of returning after falling,
each bruise a punctuation in an unfinished sentence.

This heart keeps time like a weathered drum,
beat after beat carved from patience and salt.
It remembers the taste of loss--bitter, sharp--
and turns it into a kind of sugar for motion,
a fuel that burns clean and stubborn.
It knows the weight of waiting, of quiet training,
and the strange tenderness of pain.

A champion's heart is small sometimes, like a fist,
closing to protect a fragile hope,
then opening wide to hold teammates and strangers.
It is a lighthouse that refuses to wink out
when fog presses hard against the shore.
It is all the promises whispered to oneself
in moments when no one else is listening.

Triumph arrives like a thin, surprised rain:
not the purpose, but proof that the weather changed.
Fame may pass through the room like a guest,
but the heart keeps the dishes warm for others,
learns to carry victory with both hands,
and to fold sorrow into the lining of courage.
It hums the same song whether the crowd roars or sleeps.

And when the body tires and medals cool,
the heart keeps counting small, brave things:
the extra mile run in rain, the hand offered,
the return to the mat after being downed.
Champion is not the crown held high alone--
it is the steadiness to stand again,
to keep moving toward the light you can only catch
one breath, one step, one stubborn beat at a time.

So listen: in the quiet between rounds,
there is a drum that will not stop.
Its rhythm is plain and inexorable--
a promise made again and kept.
That is the heart of a champion:
not perfect, not solitary, but unspent,
pushing forward until the world is gentler for its passing.

Every other city we go becomes a small religion --
a cathedral built from our suitcases, ticket stubs,
and the way you cup your hands around a steaming cup
like it might confess the route it took to find you.

In Marseille the sea taught us how to argue softly,
blue and salt between our teeth; in the next place
we learned to speak in corners, in leftover bread,
the quiet grammar of two people trying not to leave traces.

Every other city we go keeps a piece of your jacket,
laces knotted into memory, a receipt folded like a prayer.
One city glows with neon and stolen kisses at three a.m.;
the next is a photograph of a bench where we apologized
for the weather and for everything else we could not change.

There are cities where we sleep like travelers in borrowed names,
where strangers offer directions and we are grateful for the past.
There are cities where the lamps throw our shadows long and hopeful,
where we map each other on the backs of postcards and hotel keys.

Every other city we go is a ledger of small miracles:
the street musician who taught us a chorus, the bakery that kept our secret,
the taxi driver who listened and refused to fix our problems.
Between them, in the odd ones, the silence gathers meaning,
a quiet room where we relearn how to be two without decaying.

By the time we learn the language of stoplights and rain,
the orbit of our feet has become a constellation.
We carry cities like coins--some bright, some worn flat--
and when we press them to our palms at night they still hum,
like a promise we are not sure we ever made but keep anyway.

Every other city we go is not a loss but a ledger of living:
an atlas of small departures and the tender ways we return.
When the plane lifts its hands and the skyline thumbnails away,
I count the spaces between us and know: we are always building home
out of the few things we keep--each other, and the names we refuse to forget.

We stoke them like small rebellions -- palms cupped
around sparrows of ember, feeding breath until
the hush refuses to stay. Night bends closer,
curious as a cat, and the first sparks remember
their names: longing, ruin, tenderness.

They do not burn politely. They roar
through the corridors of ordinary days,
igniting the curtains of routine, leaving
maps of light on the floorboards. We walk them
like pilgrims, barefoot on coals that glow
with old maps of what we swore we'd become.

Sometimes the blaze scours us clean -- a bright
surgery that leaves scent of cedar and salt.
Sometimes it devours the furniture of habit,
leaving only ash and a single, stubborn ember
that glows like a promise we forgot to keep.

Love is not a candle: it is a wildfire that learns
to read our faces, to chase the syllables of our laughter,
to tender the bones that feared to be touched.
It feeds on the moon's reflection in your coffee,
on the silence after a storm. It is both anthem and warning.

So we hold each other like flint and tinder,
knowing that to strike is to change forever:
to walk out incandescent, to walk home rebuilt,
to carry, beneath our ribs, a geography of light --
hearts on fire, not to consume us, but to show us what will still burn.

Midnight breathes like a softened bell --
a hush of smoke and hopeful glass raised to the sky.
We fold the year into the palm of memory,
watching old mistakes turn to ash that glows
a little warmer than we expected.

Streetlight confetti, socks of laughter,
someone's tired song made bright by strangers' voices.
We count backwards and then forward, a small miracle:
seconds unhooked from regret,
seconds rewired to possibility.

There are pockets of grief we tuck beneath our coats,
buttons sewn over cracks -- not to hide but to keep warm.
Resolutions arrive as quiet visitors,
bearing simple gifts: a promise to be kinder,
a vow to listen to the soft things first.

A child unfurls the future like a paper boat,
and in the steam of hot coffee, futures steam too --
some will sing, some will stumble, some will arrive
with maps of scars that read like constellations.
New cheer is not the absence of pain;
it is the courage to light a match anyway.

So we step across midnight's thin line,
carrying last year's lessons like careful luggage,
and release what refuses to bend.
The sky fills with tiny suns of laughter,
and for a brief, shaking moment we believe
in beginnings as if they were prayers answered.

Hold this cheer like an ember in your palm:
tend it with truth, feed it with small acts.
By morning, the city will be ordinary again,
but something in us will remain brightened --
a single room lit from within,
ready to meet the quieter miracles of the year.

There is a drum in the chest -- not asking permission,
only keeping time with the slow tilt of the world.
Morning folds itself into the palms of your hands,
coffee cooling like a promise you almost kept;
the city exhales, a map of small fires and small mercies,
and somewhere a child learns the fierce geometry of falling.

The river does not consult the stones before it passes,
it remembers every grief and every name
and carries both like pebbles in bright mouths.
Light finds cracks in the ordinary and pours through,
insistent as forgiveness, as stubborn as a lighthouse
that has no business still calling ships home.

Love is kinetic -- a language of repeated gestures,
notes returned in the margin of a day. Loss is kinetic too:
it arranges itself into the furniture and the silence,
sits in your chair as if it had always lived there,
learns the cadence of your hands at the sink,
keeps visiting at the hour you thought was private.

It never stops: the turning of seasons, the folding of maps
we thought we'd read through. It never stops:
the naming of things, the singeing of hope and the rescue,
the ringing of keys, the making of beds, the letting go,
the beginning and the small remaking after ruin.
We are paper boats on a rain that insists on rising.

Sometimes it is tenderness that will not pause,
a stranger's umbrella given without explanation;
sometimes it is the ache that rehearses itself at night,
a slow metronome beneath the ribs. Both keep time,
both insist on being lived through. We are not finished
with what we are learning to be -- not yet, not ever.

Stand, if you can, with your palms open to the noise:
the endless work of love, the stubborn chorus of sorrow,
the quiet repairs, the sudden laugh that undoes you.
There is a pulse in everything that breathes and breaks,
and even in breaking, something decides to continue.
Listen: it never stops -- and for now, that is a way to live.

Every dog has its day,
a small sun rising where the pavement cracks--
a gnawed slipper baptized in morning light,
a tail that learns to count the world.
Some days are thunder: sprinting down alleys,
nose like a compass to the vanished scent of dinner,
others are hush, a bed warmed by remembered hands.

There is the streetwise king with dust for a crown,
who finds a spilled sandwich and is royal for an hour.
There is the champion in the backyard--leaps like a yes,
eyes bright with the grammar of fetch,
who comes back every time with the whole day's praise caught in his mouth.

There is the old dog whose joints keep ledger,
who remembers every door that ever opened,
who dreams of running and wakes to the ache like a bell.
When the child drops a slice of toast, his tail--slow as forgiveness--answers.

There is the small one under the shelter light,
nose pressed to a cool, hopeful window,
who waits through seasons of goodbyes until a hand arrives,
and the world tilts, a plain made new as a bowl of water on a hot day.
For some, the day is loud with applause; for others, it is a single soft hand.

Every dog has its day,
not always the headline, but a holy quiet: a lap, a leash, a laugh,
the warmth of one familiar voice reciting the same silly name.
Sometimes it's a road that ends in a porch where the moon lays its silver paw.
Sometimes it's the simple miracle of being seen.

So let mornings be patient and let sunsets keep their secrets.
Listen for paws like small metronomes on the floor--count them.
Because when that day comes, it will be a bright thing:
brief, ordinary, fierce as joy, and it will make everything else forgiveable.