come!
sit. down. good girl. roll over—roll—ah-ah sit. down, roll over roll ov—no. down. roll over roll o v e r okay. paw! other paw! touch! touch! touch! sit! down! roll over good girl good girl yes good girl
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The medical school application strips me down to
my skeleton, flays my flesh and lays it open for inspection organizes my organs by alphabetical order and importance to white coat ceremony. I donate my brain, blood, and bone to medicine hope I am a sufficient specimen for science; pray my heart still beats poetry on the other side. Maybe love is in a rainbow
in the shins of bumble bees the corner of a snowstorm where an iris buries deep I'm a crushed lung in mourning at night I breathe through my teeth I'm stuttered by the feeling of her ribs rising beneath me Maybe love is the snowstorm the sting of worker bees in the oily rainbow of a puddle a spring where flowers sleep Who am I with you?
You reached into my chest & seized the tender parts of me Trojan horsed your way past my walls You could have crumbled me You could have plundered me of all my secrets Rained locusts But instead, you called me sister Mayumi, my sister You have made me better than I am You’ve held a mirror to my face & given me bunny ears How can I ever thank you for all the laughter? My ribs rattled from it, that was only ever any pain We linked arms & searched cities together Planned out our expeditions for next time, now that there won’t be a next time I don’t know the steps forward You had mapped those out for me With you, I was someone’s sister, accomplice, best friend Who am I without you? I haven’t a clue where I go from here From hurting, from loneliness, from without you My past is myth I need to eventually get up and write new legends In them, every guide, mentor, and ally They will all have your face They will love with your heart But your laugh? I’ll hold that in my throat & set it free I still wake up like I'm dreaming
My hands still search the damp sheets for my phone scrambling for evidence that you're really gone. Maybe you're a leg I slept on funny numb and bloodless, but there The last time we spoke was two weeks ago perhaps only hours too early and already much too late The mechanical limbs turning and virus searching the miles between our beds I didn't say good night to you. I carried you around in my pocket not knowing that I'd open my eyes panting out everything I still haven't said to you only screen light smiling back Death. To me. Is a period. At the end of a sentence or lodged between cervical vertebrae of one. A conclusion. I've been told. You are never done writing a poem. Revisions are iterative. A work is progress. Writing never rests. What then. Is a period. But a verb in flight.
i won't cry
that is, i can't i can't will the water to flow pool or spill there must be a backup upstream somewhere ice? climate change frozen. or drought? the bottoms of the rivers bloody with clay. or maybe there is a fire someone left the stove on while they slept the whole forest dried up the waterways trying to put it out my tears are no emergency Why is it
that when she takes the pills, we say, but she was so young Did her youth not give her the right to suffer? to die? we say, what a shame Did she not do enough time in her bones to deserve people missing her? to earn an honorable discharge? am I wrong to do this. to look at her instagram and tag the ugliness that sour shadow stretching out from her soles staining the underside of her smile pointed imitation of her in full view of an unwitting audience to murder maybe one day i'll remember the smell of her hair today, i only know the blunt edge of her goneness i'm at a funeral for her pain Use the space below to tell us why you want to go to medical school.
The mountains look closer than they are morning fog misting across the first teasing taste of sun you could almost pluck a handful of cottony gas following Appalachian tradition of reaching up at the sky fingers barely scraping it Used to be a farm, she told me used to have a horse from Long Island and these trees, all this brush and crap used to be gone I plan to fix up these houses and convert the place into a writers' retreat one day There was a whistling in my ears and live coals licking the walls of my chest in all the movies, the audience knows better than to open a window better burn than blow up, but the character never does and never gets the chance Small towns gossip like Zumba moms at the studio the effort sweats out toxins and drinks in tea each session a chance to pull bigger weights, wear taller sneaks. Here, no one grows up; just bigger |
KatA young adult. Archives
April 2020
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