words don't come that easy.

x

24.03.22
10:10

at eighty-six / but you stop fearing it long before then / you stop picturing the tractor trailer swerving and the cervical tumors growing / you start to embrace the spirit as separate from the body-it is bigger than all five foot of you/it is bigger than the moose head you stood next to at the thrift shop/how it swallowed you in the deep brown depths of its iris

you let go of things that no longer serve you-you put in your two weeks notice / to your job / to your friends/ to your lover / to eating fistfuls of shredded italian cheese at 2:00 am because you cannot / quiet the fuzz in your brain to go back to sleep - like feedback from the amp, like AM radio

you spend a month traveling across the country / alone/you write about it / people tell you it's romantic / you spit at them; fuck romance / you sell poems on the side of the highway / for gas money; in your overalls/ a little girl gives you a flower she doesn't know the name of/ but it's bright pink with bursting petals and you write about that too

your mother doesn't die from lung cancer / your father eventually does/you spread his ashes in northern Italy / on the ferris wheel at Coney Island / outside of a tiny house in Boca Raton / where he first made spaghetti for your mother

you are invited to read your poetry/ and again, and again/ and yet again/ you get hate

mail, and you burn it / you are an alchemist / you can turn vitriol into warmth / and so

you do. you fall, not once, or twice / but every single day with / strangers in grey sweatpants on the subway / strangers with their nose in Miller and Anais / strangers who make space to hold open doors / with every blue nose pit in the shelter / you tell yourself you want to adopt one / you end up adopting two / Benny and Joon

you marry one of those strangers / on a mountaintop in the Catskills / the sky gapes with torrential rain when you say I Do / your dress is soaked and smocked with mud/ but you both are doubled over with fits of laughter/ and you think you understand / love/you have one baby, and lose another/but now you really understand/love/you don't let it harden you/you let it break yourself open / like an egg cracked and split / by your own tender and calloused hands.