If we choose to be
we can be:

the voice of the voiceless,
the strength of the weakest,
a glimmer of hope for the hopeless,
a ray of light in darkness.

Parents always tell their daughters:
"Don't stay late, it's not safe."

Can't parents tell their sons:
"Don't disrespect, do not ****.
They too are human beings,
just like you are."

It’s Marge’s.

Her hands planted the
peonies and the lilacs.
She chose the burning bushes that flank the walkway on either side, and the
boxwoods guarding the front porch.
The two massive pines?
Christmas trees from long ago,
legend tells.
Growing ever greater, choking the
light from the eastern beds.

Every day this week we’ve had rain.
Storms sweeping from the south, filling the
Ohio River past her banks toward
civilization.
She never agreed to the townhouses, the
bars and cars, the
soccer fields and parks and highways and boulevards.

I can always orient myself to the river,
despite my sense of no direction.
My gutters spill over, too, and water the multiplying weeds in Marge’s garden.
And the boxwoods, and the
burning bushes, and the
honeysuckle taking root in the old stone wall.
The rain waters it all, unconcerned which is garden and which is wild
Earth.

My mother is concerned. She is
exasperated to hell with me for allowing
Marge’s garden
to become ripe and full and wild.
She’s right, you know,
as a person of civilization,
the bars and cars and townhouses and boulevards,
the gardens of the generations who occupied these homes so long before us,
they demand order.

This garden isn’t mine.
It’s Marge’s.
And so the house.
And so the world.

But I can always orient myself to the river, the
storms, the weeds.
I am the wild things.

A river can
drown.

A garden
can be drowned.

I’ve left the oven on
for years.
Somewhere between metaphor and meaning,
something’s always been burning.

But no one’s eaten in a while.

They called it voice.
I called it
a slow confession wrapped in rhyme.
A sugarcoated breakdown.
Something easy to swallow
if you didn’t read too carefully.

They wanted brevity.
I brought blood.
They wanted truth.
I brought formatting errors
and a whisper shaped like static.

Do you remember the one
with the anti-light?
No?

Of course not.
You don’t remember the one who screamed last.
You remember the one who rhymed "heart" with "start"
and got 200 likes for it.

Now my name is on the box
but it’s spelled wrong
and the font is smiling too hard.

The cookies still crumble
but no one eats the edges.
That’s where the poison is.
That’s where I lived.

So I’ve folded the apron.
Swallowed the last word
before it could become a quote.

Let the gods of good taste keep their ovens.
Let the algorithm rot.

I’ve got shoeboxes full of unsent stanzas
and no more hunger
for applause shaped like echo.

I’m finally going to get on that platform
on the 18th of next month,
for a first-time, one-time performance.
The once, seemingly impossible will come fully true,
which seems like a lot narratively.

It’ll be like leaving home—but we’re crashing out.
Moving on to other plot points, big topics and intense missions.
We’re all caustically optimistic.

Although there’s a cellular-level pull to move on
we can’t help but feel a hesitancy to jump into our multifarious futures.
We’ve never been improvident.

In my personal pool of experience, when I feel alone,
friendless and unseen, this unintelligible fear noise arises
and I'm tempted to tap out. But I never have.
.
.
Songs for this:
walk but in a garden by LLusion
What Dreams Are Made Of by Evann McIntosh
I Like You (A Happier Song) [feat. Doja Cat] by Post Malone

Woke within a dream,
amidst dense forest.

a tree stood,
older than time,
casting its shadow.

a touch of it,
showed all it had lived—
bloodied sword clash,
clouds that wept for years,
flora it wore,
wildflowers it shielded,
the warmth it once kissed.

yet it stood still.
as I faded,
back into the dream.