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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I wrote a poem 😁

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Are these socks from yesterday?
It’s been a month since I last shaved
But at least my eyebrows can finally grow even

Acting out one-woman dramas,
Locked myself out in pajamas
I knew I’d have to walk a mile in slippers some day

Weapons classes in my kitchen
My poor neighbors have to listen
Who’s laundry am I folding and how’d it get here anyway?

I don’t need a bra today
What the heck is Maprilay?
Neighbor singing in the bathroom and now I know all the lyrics

I’m getting dressed at 3PM
I brushed my hair, but that was when
I treasured the give-a-damn; trust me, it’s overrated

Shops downtown are straight-up vacant
Did I walk past that camera naked?
Smile for me, darling, and we’ll be okay.

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