And after all those centuries, Mom, why do you still worship the boys?
That’s why I can’t write you a poem. I can’t write it for my friends either,
I don’t see much of them. I live where people live now
life like, their ideas like crabapples.
I look at my yard like I’m a real sort of person.
I sit at a desk of someone: I hear she wrote.
She trained for some epic war
that would always keep her cellared, always longing: bang!
that mirror was green & breezy &
she longed the hell out of it. You could say
she’s too full of readiness: she trained for everything but this—
bureaucracy and happiness—
but I have to learn to write about just living
so close to the voids.
To write in a speech I wasn’t born mouthing
about the ground I wasn’t born sniffing
My face stuffed full of the land and the language of longing
hell yeah. I’ll learn to write just like you,
green stems are growing out of me, I belong everywhere
in you: Hi, I’m you, it’s so filling
when there’s only one of us here.