I am late to work again.

Just make it simple, I tell myself,
and say thank God you’re not a therapist.

I am lighter for my foot bath and ready—ready for a new me,
garnished with exotic island melodies,
coating me with love no longer here,
but becoming the very first, stable platform for the rebuild…

Ready for what’s next.

In saying goodbye, whatever the age,
did you know it’s alright to wonder,
the way ladybugs often do?

Will you come with me towards bright beautiful flight,
before landing just right,
like insects in my belly?

Paradise is sanctuary if it keeps your hands from shaking,
and foulness where it shouldn’t be.

My sweet child
and I sit crowned by persistence.
I believe in me, where I was birthed,
how to hold you again.

Trying to change my view
‘til I’m resting in somebody’s arms,
but finding my way home through the rain
fragrant, alluring—but jaggedly thorned,
my gaze fixed in the perfect spill of stars.

And in their imperfections, I rise.

Feral cat jumps from the wood pile
for all of us—
unfurl, veins of my freedom,
prepare to love and finally to live,
live life to the full—stop—

Does any of that sound like consumerism to you?
United We Stand, yet unable to thrive.
I love you more,
at least on the outside.

No cliché ever held more truth.

The nerves have long stretched outwards from my spine,
and though the illness lingers, so do I,
high above it all.

It is every baby’s laugh,
with real life left for living in between,
a quiet door to a peace that isn’t a crime,
and always the last forever.

Slowly I come back into my body and the hope
that the tape in this tiny drawer
will be enough.

I took down the sparkle-lines tonight
and sung in an age of captivity,
here now, here now, here now….

Beauty has come to this world,
where nothing holds,
and nothing has to.

The Last Line We Hold is a cento, built entirely from the final lines of every poem in What We Hold On To: Poems of Coping, Connection, and Carrying On. No lines were rewritten or removed, just re-ordered. 

The poem was inspired by a cento created by contributor Melissa Lemay, who recently assembled a poem using the first lines of each poem in the same book. Seeing those openings gathered together made me curious about the other end of the book, about what remained after each poem finished speaking.

I think it actually works surprisingly well! 

– Nick Allison

The original lines in this poem were written by the following contributors (listed here alphabetically, not in the order in which their lines appear): Meridith Allison, Nick Allison, Rachel Armes-McLaughlin, Brent Boeckman, Kate Bremer, Paul Cannon, R.M. Carlson, Zsófia Hajnal, Sam Hendrian, Audrey Howitt, Carol Anne Johnson, Erica Johnson, Frank Johnson, Melissa Lemay, Barbara Harris Leonhard, Isabelle Luebke, Sue McBean, Luke Meyers, Aubrey Phoenix, Kerfe Roig, Nicole Sara, Phoebe Shade, Merril D. Smith, Edward St. James, Joshua Walker, Eileen ‘ike’ West, Kim Whysall-Hammond, Meghan Woodward.

The accompanying digital collage was created using elements from What We Hold On To, incorporating Bonner Fowles’ original cover artwork, with visual references to interior illustrations by Phoebe Shade and Isabelle Luebke, and to the epigraph voices of Jeff Tweedy, Leonard Cohen, and Wendell Berry. It also pays tribute to our first published collection, Record of Dissent.

Cento — Poetry Foundation
From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer. Centos had a resurgence in popularity with the rise of collage as a compositional device among Modernist writers.