Kerfe Roig

She was weary of her fragile subsistence, of the looming and
inevitable collapse of any scaffolding of support. The gatekeepers
distributed no methods of survival, only rampant indifference.
Despair mingled with neglect. She floated on swirling waters that
never seemed to drift towards any shore. Her solitude ached like a
dark tunnel too small to hold even the palest of light.

Each day became an impossible pilgrimage through the immensity
of her hunger, her grief. Where was she going? She did not know.

in the beginning
empty hands—gathering, then
listening, feeling

Her hands became entwined with the rhythms of the circles she had
traveled, over and over, spinning the earth’s gifts into fibers that
shimmered with their own light. She passed them through the
portal of the needle, the intersected web of fabric, in, out, over,
under, through.

thread transformed—
trees, birds, landscape, sky—
sanctuary

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Silver Birch Press, Feral, Pure Haiku, Zen Space, Visual Verse, Collaborature, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, The Raw Art Review, The Anthropocene Hymnal, and The Polaris Trilogy. Follow her explorations on her blogs, methodtwomadness.wordpress.com (which she does with her friend Nina) and kblog.blog.

This poem appeared in What We Hold On To: Poems of Coping, Connection, and Carrying On — Winter 2026, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.