Harrowing & exhilarating

Your encouraging words of description feel just right
as I struggle to be heard, and work to remember
and depict this long summer month, which approached
like a soot-stained messenger fueling his miner’s light
with pain and grief and fear. And yet what dynamite
remains here for me, defiant in a laughing gas chamber,
determined to retain a personal trainer, a shortened-life coach.