What Asks to Be Saved

I open the workshop as if unbandaging a wound—
slow, careful, bracing for what’s still tender.
Plaster dust rises in the half‑light,
settling on everything I meant to mend.

On the table, another porcelain girl waits in her box—
fractures threading her face
like a map I’ve traced too many times.
I tell myself to walk back out into the morning,
but the clean split through her cheek
pulls me forward before I can turn.

My hands move before I agree to anything.
I’ve sworn I’m finished with this work,
yet they keep arriving—
swaddled in tissue,
their silence already tugging at the part of me
that never learned to refuse.

Her face loosens under my touch—
a seam giving way,
a fault line bright as a thin blade of light.
Damage repeats itself with such fluency
I barely need to look
to know where the next fracture runs—

and still, I can’t set her down
she looks at me the way no one else does—
as if I might know how to save her.