The Jacket I Keep for Bad News

I own a jacket just for storms that start inside the phone,

a second skin I keep for bad news, heavy and overgrown.

It hangs beside the door like rain that never learned to fall.

A siren sewn in navy cloth, on call, on call, on call.

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The fabric smells of hospital and late-night taxi rides,

of coffee gone to charcoal while the waiting room decides.

Its pockets hoard old crumpled slips of everything went wrong,

appointment times, and x-ray dates and names that don’t belong.

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Whenever life says, “Have a seat,” in that fluorescent tone,

I shrug it on like armor built from every time I’ve known.

It buttons grief across my chest in careful, practiced rows,

a scaffold for the heart to climb when nothing else knows how.

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You have your ways of hearing fate—a playlist, a certain chair;

I have this jacket, thick with ghosts, still warming empty air.

It learned my shape the night the call rewrote my family’s sky,

the seams remembering how I walked when all I did was try.

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Inside its lining, sweat and salt chart continents of fear,

little maps of every night I wished I wasn’t here.

Yet look: the cuffs are fraying now, the elbows growing thin—

Even armor tires of the storms we house beneath our skin.

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One day I’ll meet bad news bare-armed, in just a cotton shirt,

with sleeves that smell of orange peel, not antiseptic hurt.

I’ll let the cold wind find my pulse and name me still alive,

no longer needing borrowed weight to prove I might survive.

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But for today, I stroke the cloth and thank it for the years—

for holding up my shaking frame, for catching loosened tears.

Then hang it back and breathe, “Not yet,” as if the night can choose

to pass me by without the jacket I keep for bad news.