How bittersweet beginnings are,
because the taste of the fatal end,
is still fresh on the tongue.
But,
Read More »Category: Poetry
My Hands.
my hands,
from which i divine with.
to caress a glossy deck
and trust that they know when to pull a sword or a cup.
palms up in my lap during quiet morning musings,
to invite stillness and knowing into my days.
an ode to porches.
To porches,
for carrying the heavy late nights and the bountiful early mornings,
for the oak to hold our treads,
to cradle our sorry existences,
to brace us under the lumens.
a window isn’t enough.
Read More »Things Unsullied.
The eyes you have,
when you experience change,
wet like a newborn animal,
darting and buzzing as they move through the nameless,
versus the eyes you have looking at familiarity,
glossing over similarity,
running the same current over and over,
until there are no more sparks.
What happens between those sets of eyes?
When does it die, the wonderment?
through diamonds and molasses
The way grief pours into you,
thick and rich like molasses,
sealing the loss with sticky solemnity.
Eternal Unrest.
When death stretches your eyelids,
so tight you don’t have time to rewind,
to have tea with your demons,
to repent and regret and relinquish yourself,
they stay rigoured,
a forced awakening of your last moments.
Only a life of sin would force your eyes open upon death, as if to say,
“watch yourself burn.”
An afterlife of eternal unrest,
reserved for the wicked.
Leave a Mark.
Hope is a Finite Resource.
Hope courses through my veins,
but one nick and it empties onto my skin.
the tradeoff for maturity.
I gave up all my childhood relics too early.
I refused my dolls, my stuffed animals, my notebooks full of novel ideas,
to swallow maturity instead.
I was sooner than ready ushered into adulthood,
to wear the mark of maturity ripe on my flat chest.
Every “you’re so mature” proclaimed from an adult singed it deeper into my flesh.
The scar soothed my loss.
Yet, I was not welcome in adult spaces.
I was hushed and spoken over, my emotions belittled,
contrived in the twilight zone of being a child in years, but not in feeling.
Now, I am an adult in years only.
In feeling, perhaps a quiet, old matriarch whose hands are calloused with past lives.
But I have danced for many years in the arms of apparent maturity,
surely I should be a natural?
I am anything but.
The dance is awkward and clumsy, and my teacher is absent.
I traded the precious performance of childhood for adult approval.
And now? I don’t know how to dance.
THE FINAL EXAM
If not for your sweet curves and sugar lips, how would I know bitterness?
If not for your striking grit, how would I know timidity?
If not for your heavy and boundless laughs, how would I know silence?
Lashanda Forsberg 