LIFE Poem: Inheritance of Breath, by Natasha Kinsella

The first accident was not collision,
but telling
words sheared sideways,
the subject erased,
verbs drifting like ash.

By the time it reached me,
the story limped without a body,
only aftermath.

At the table
we recited half-sentences
like prayer before eating.
“If she hadn’t.”
“If I had.”
“If it wasn’t in the blood.”
The pauses hardened into heirlooms,
polished across generations.

A mother’s hush performed as mercy.
A father’s absence staged as fate.

I learned to upholster silence,
to swallow verbs whole,
to smuggle shame inside grammar
as if language itself
were contraband.

Accident is not rupture.
It accumulates
multiplying in omissions,
breeding beneath wallpaper,
painting the surface smooth
while cracks keep breathing underneath.

So I practiced the passive:
it was managed,
it was settled,
it could not be helped.
Each phrase a sealed jar,
air thinning inside,
pressure holding back
what wanted to burst.

But silence breeds silence.
It seeps through bone,
drifts like damp through walls,
ordinary, unstoppable.

Now the grammar tilts.
The subject steadies.
The verb holds.

And what escapes my mouth
is not apology,
but breath
unruly, visible,
threading the air like wire
pulled from a wreck.

Breath that refuses punctuation,
spills its own syntax,
claims survival
not as ending,
but as a sentence
still being written.