First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Hiraeth

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HIRAETH
(Half My Heart)

Children of kings, with a strict code of living
            That I learned selectively.
The righteous don’t wrong us
Their values don’t haunt us
Until the moment that they trade us all for richer things.

Discord Enthroned Me
Midas died lonely
Trust and Integrity
Must be
Roiling in their graves.

Deceptions are beautiful so long as they bring you peace
I think it was over the moment that he touched my wrist.

***

I am a warrior, but you were better than me
And the blame, when it came, cut deep
So I say again, leave me out of it and practice what you preach.

And I’ve been
Struck across the face
By the rubble, when it fell,
Of the pedestal I placed you on.
Should have known it was too perfect to be stable.

So you take the treachery,
I want the memories
You keep the blasphemy;
I’ll treasure the taste of a million long-gone
Halcyon moments
Cling to the lies, if that’s what you need.
I’ll pretend it’s alright with me.

Stop the clocks.
That terrified time, fossilized,
At two in the morning
Is not the moment I live most.

It’s driving too fast with my head through the sunroof
Taking pictures like a tourist in a city I love(d) more than any of mine.
Breakfast at midnight. The others don’t get it
I knew you were pregnant, most of the time.
And I never learned the words to that street-side singer’s songs,
But your family danced with me and the pavilion watched us perform as he played them.

It’s sitting outside, mesmerized, because we don’t get fireflies
Like this in Texas.

Fancy wine in paper cups
Swallowed up
By the things I don’t say.
And damn the barrier
So invisible, so tangible that even I can’t break it
And I broke a lot of things.
What do you tell them all, when they ask about me?

I still dream the unsaid goodbyes, I made a wish, I broke the ties.
(I regret it every day.)

And through the years
Of painstakingly carving away the wrong parts of my identity
I finally found who I wanted to be
In your children.

So I bargain for a way back.
I beg an outcome different than these past months have sown.
With defining moments scarred apart and
Half my heart lost in November, and beating on its own.

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