forgetyoself

I was hoping to find answers in the pile of ash, in the stubbed out joints, in the knocked bottles laying low. I asked questions to the pile of dishes, to the hidden car keys, to the terrified dog. As I was heading out, the sun said "climb high into the sky with me, from this vantage point you can see everything." And for a while I tried. Came to work. Arranged my poker face. Let the creases of my mouth do their thing. But as I was heading home, the trees threw up their hands in resignation, every road leading back to the questions. What wild idea will he think of next, halfway out the door, brain brimming with honey and seeping with l

Charleena Lyles, plucked from her home. Nabra Hassanen, Philando Castile, plucked from the streets. Trees without leaves. Activists, plucked from their wheelchairs; the young, plucked from a concert, a nightclub; the poor, risen from a building. Clouds without the sky. They want to make empty spaces out of people. Out of humans. Out of Certain People. And only the tears will be left. Only the throat noises from the living. They will show you the memorial photos. They will show you how the space made room for the wind to blow through their fingers, now. They will show you the sidewalks ridden with flowers. And they'll gladly show you the

I want to tell you about what happens when the music kicks in I want to tell you about the beautiful people who explode beautifully in front of me I want to tell you about the good drink at the coffee shop about the world news, the dead grunge singers I want to tell you about the windowsill about caring too much I want to tell you about my dog and what it's like to fall asleep by her bed I want to tell you about a memory of a sunset I want to tell you about what it's like to get used I want to tell you about what it's like when you finally get to talk about it I want to tell you about not being a doormat anymore about being a human being I w

It's hard to know how to make a new space for myself after severing an attachment, even if I sever a bad one, like an infected limb. You realize the limb mattered, in some way. You don't know what to do with what's left. I put one foot in front of the other, wondering how to inhabit my own space. Trying to figure out how to be me, just me. Me without another name in my head. Me without a nervous, twisting heart. Me without being owned by anybody. Today, the sun was enough. People's smiles were enough. My smiles were brighter, too, appreciating every person I pass. I imagine me holding seeds, fresh earth, new life. I know the ground is f

I still mourn for the kid in me who didn't know better, the kid who didn't learn better, the girl whose no was not stitched into her soul. I mourn for her. She who preferred a boy to the echoless black, she who quietly drowned under any touch at all. I know her, too, as the ghost who still follows. A ghost who knows I have left behind that sweat-choked life, that submergence under sea. She stands behind my shoulders now, pale, small and smiling. Glad to see who I've become.

I had a nightmare of the woods: a group of friends and I took a shortcut from the party in a jeep, in twilight. As soon as darkness descended, little children-shaped beings emerged with old-world clothing, elf caps, rorschach faces. They shot dead vines from their wrists binding us to trees, filling our mouths, drowning our jeep. Once, when I wasn't dreaming, a friend and I got lost in the woods. I watched the darkness fall around her hair as we touched the trees to look for markers. The lights peeping through the branches told us there would be no snarl, no chance we'd evaporate, lifeless, into sunlight. We entered campus from a stran

holds memories of sickle moons and shining cars. All day it hears carts rumble, children scream. It watches bodies carry produce back to the mountains, the cars following telephone poles like a river. It might tell you that these people could be in an ant farm, if the ants were slower, and smoked, and looked as if they forgot where they were going. When there are no bodies to hold, it closes its eyes and imagines better colors for the stretched-out grey. It knows without looking what smoke coils through its slats, what stories human weight tells. It liked things better before it was touched, cut and bolted down, before the warehouses, a

I watched a cartoon woman break down into the two women who lived inside her, the ones in love, watched her explain this to a boy as fusion. She was the embodiment of this love, two lovers so close they shared the same arms and legs. I wondered how close we as humans could get. Or what, in other words, was fusion? Fusion is my head on my best friend's shoulder, watching my other best friend perform poetry to bass-     the magic in the air to prove it. Fusion doesn't need bodies- might be when my eyes keep company with the setting sun     on the leaves, is when I wake to him crawling to our bed     and we talk in the dark. It's not s

So today in my poetry class, my teacher brought up a really interesting point about writing poetry. He said that you don't really write about stuff, that poems aren't really about anything, but that poetry comes from whatever subconscious things are laying around inside. He made a distinction between our emotional, instinctual "lizard" brain, or "id" if you will, and our more intellectual problem-solving brain, and said that when you give your brain a problem to solve or an experiment to work with, the subconscious, poetic stuff of the lizard brain will come out. That's why prompts are so useful--the intellectual brain is kept busy trying to

The story goes that a man wishes something away without understanding its integral importance. He watches as his life swirls into chaos without this thing and is lucky enough to wake up in the forgiving arms of sleep. What really happens to us is that we slowly rub ourselves against the grindstone trying to dissolve our faults, every day we hope that life can grind us down to the essence of our true selves. We hope, too, to get the things that we want but we know that a wish like a rainbow has no tail end. The eyelash falls the dandelion scatters 11:11 jumps to 11:12 and life moves on.