Light pools thin as breath on hallway tiles.
Shirts hang mid-thought on the door.

You touch your shoes to mine—
dusty twins—
folding the day’s weight into the bed’s edge.

Curtain’s hem brushes the sill; outside,
a car door closes soft as a book.
Your hand smooths the sheet once, twice—
a small storm settling into calm.

Air shivers—your knuckle traces my wrist,
gravity shifts; a pulse flickers at your throat.
Jaw’s hinge holds the words you don’t release.
The tendon behind your knee trusts its tremble.

Heart knocks, tentative, beneath ribs—
lungs cradle ghost-breaths.

Rooms unmapped—
corridors of shame.

My palm finds your spine’s fragile rewrite.
Bone recalls impact; muscle, flinch;
skin remembers each choosing.

Breath stumbles over a word we never spoke—
it tastes salted on my tongue.

Edges blur—
your shoulder a cliff I climbed,
your hair the wet field where I learned solitude.

Your scar thins—
a river finding mine.

Pronouns fracture—
fingertips test surfaces.
Pulse migrates to my wrist;
fear wakes in your throat.

Memory fades; apology begins.
The ceiling reclaims its shape.
Curtains light to ordinary cloth.
We dress in dayskins—
socks, shirt, bra clasp.

Between throat and sternum,
a door held half-open—
the body tucking new country
into an ache it cannot name.

Where does outside stop speaking?
Where inside begins to answer?

Let this remain an open question.

…

Topher Shields is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work traces the fractures between silence, ritual, and inheritance. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Shore, DIALOGIST, The Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and other journals.