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unwritten Nov 2016
no taste.

still, though,
cool and crisp enough
to bring about a smile.

and what a relief,
what a change of pace
to write a poem
about something that don’t deserve no poetry,

for once.

i feel a little bubble of anger,
of bitterness
at the knowledge that the words come easier when my mouth is on fire.

what the hell.
for a few seconds the cool seeds slide down easy.

no taste.

(a.m.)
written 11.25.16. inspired by eating cucumber. i hope this makes sense.
  Nov 2016 unwritten
B Irwin
does hamburger meat stick together because it is still searching for the ghost of it's bones?
in college, i worked in a factory.
i trudged to work every monday morning at five thirty and put on gloves
to plunge into the sticky mess of beef that i weighed and clipped and submerged in.
the meat sticks together and bleeds into the same palm, which is my own.
i am livestock.
i am a nonsensical sticky mass of fat that is being pulled apart by another.
although i am trying to pull myself back together,
the bones i clung to were yours.
  Nov 2016 unwritten
naava
When my father stepped off the plane twenty years ago and found his way to
The Bronx where his brothers were waiting for him,
It was to live every day plagued by stories of his
Roommates being followed home by wickedly-grinning, knife-brandishing men
That took pleasure in wounding the skin of my uncle who worked
For seven dollars a day, and then sent it all home to his mother.
And I know this isn’t what he wanted for me.
I even know, sometimes, that it’s not what he wanted for himself.
Didn’t want to open a bank account, become a citizen of the internet,
Watch as his labor was digitized and filed away on a supercomputer
And used to calculate the distance from here to the moon.

Last month my taxes contributed to Nike’s two billion dollars in
Government subsidies, my money,
Taken from my pocket and used to make sneakers more expensive than my
Last paycheck.

Sometimes I think I’m America’s mistake,
A child of the New Generation,
Born to emphasize the difference between affect and effect,
But never affect the way change is effected,
And I want, so desperately to be a warrior of my time
But I’ve only been taught to reaffirm the rules of grammar and
Sip coffee in silence as the world turns around me.

Sometimes all I want to do is cry.

It’s easy to blame America for your mistakes,
And it’s easy to say you shouldn’t blame America for your mistakes,
And I think once I find the dividing line, the fence, the border between the two,
I’ll understand what it means to be American.
I’ll know what it means to salute the flag and sing the
Pledge of Allegiance with my head held high and my hand placed
Proudly over my heart.

I hope I never find that line.

In school we’re taught A is for Apple and B is for Blue and C is for
Candy, sickly sweet and only sold out of the backs of white vans in the dead of night.
D is for death, which I still don’t understand,
And E is for easy, something that I, as a woman, must know the meaning of.
In school we’re taught to build city halls and towering skyscrapers
Out of wooden blocks, but I’m seventeen and still don’t know where my last name comes from.
In school, I’m ten, and my teacher is making fun of the spanish music I grew up listening to,
The kind with the classical guitar intro that my father can imitate perfectly,
The kind that made me smile until I was ten and became background noise when I was eleven.

In school, I built bridges out of cardboard boxes.

My father didn’t come here to be an environmental engineer.
My father didn’t come here to beg me to major in astronomy because he wishes he’d done
That instead.
I don’t know why my father came here.
When I ask, he tells me it was for the job opportunities - there’s nothing back home -
But I see it in his eyes when he goes home to the house in Ecuador he’s spent
19 years having built.
I see it in his eyes when we finally have a conversation for the first time all week,
Usually on a Saturday,
Because we’re both too busy during the week to take a moment to breathe and say,
In simple english, “Hi. How are you. Hope you’re doing well.”

Sometimes, it’s too easy to blame America for my mistakes,
But sometimes, America deserves it.
I’ll never know why people are the way they are, and I’ll spend a lifetime wondering,
But I know why I am the way I am,
And sometimes all I can do is hold onto that before it’s taken from me
Like the taxes from my paycheck
That are still paying Nike to feed the world the sick, twisted lie that it’s as easy as breathing to
Just do it.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t care,
Because it’d be easy as rain to comply with complacency and
Maybe then, I’d be able to sit back and watch them destroy themselves
And I wouldn’t have to be a part of it.

I’m told we revolt at dawn, but I’m too busy fielding calls from people who want to know
If I’m going, who won’t go if I’m not, who won’t go unless there’s a crowd they can
Disappear into.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t care, because if I didn’t I could stop being afraid of a world
Where caring is dangerous and sugar pills are the only thing on the
Dining hall menu.
I’m told we revolt at dawn, and when I show up, the sun is barely rising and I lift my head
To the sky and breathe in the scent of rebellion, finally, because it’s about time.

We are all immigrants.
We are all immigrants.
We are all immigrants.

Except, apparently, some of us.

I’m five years old and get to sleep in on the second Monday in October and I’m told
It’s a celebration of when God sailed across the ocean and created the forests
Only five hundred years ago.
And I buy it, of course I do, because I’m five years old and though God already doesn’t exist,
I don’t have any other explanation for why the forests are what they are, or
How I got here, of all places. America.
And I don’t know why I can’t run across the country and back again because I don’t have
A single clue about the concept of space, or time, and then,
When I think about it, how dare they tell me America was found when I’m too young to
Challenge them on it.

We can plan to revolt at dawn, but the police will already be there at midnight,
Waiting for us, and if we can’t walk into the path of resistance and keep going,
We might as well not even try.

My T.V. once told me there’s a magic trick for everything, and apparently,
Breaking out of handcuffs was one of them.
At this point, that might be our best option.

But you can’t major in magic, and breaking out of handcuffs won’t pay the bills.
I don’t have all the answers, and I know that kneeling during the national anthem will
Cause so much White Male Outrage there’ll be headlines for days,
But it’s something.
I care about a lot of things, but staying silent isn’t one of them.

If I’m America’s mistake, then so is my father, and so is the revolution at dawn,
And so is Columbus day.
All I know is I’m seventeen and I still don’t know what comes after
“And to the republic, for which it stands,”
And I hope one day I won’t be criticized for failing to memorize patriotic rhetoric.

We are all immigrants.
We are all immigrants.
Remember, we revolt at dawn.
unwritten Nov 2016
in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light, i
treasure you.
the sole familiar thing.

an old, cloying taste
clings to my mouth.
i think you are sleeping.
i know? you are sleeping.
i awoke to silence filled by your silence.
i know you are sleeping;
i felt loved by your silence, still.

i know this is love i imagine for myself in the ways i need it most;
i know how this goes.

in the early morning hum,
in the beat of the drum of the white noise and the misplaced light,
i allow myself to feel a very real fear that you
will be everything i needed
and almost everything i want.

and so in preparation,
a separation:
i shift and twitch and shiver until i am at once here
and not,
until i am at once here
and in the moment,
some way down the line,
that old, cloying taste magnified,
when all comes to pass as i knew it would and i can say
“i knew it would.”
i know how this goes.

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and i, the one to new york.
when sleep greets me and leans my head
gently
against the window pane,
i will let it come.
i will let it try to fill your absence
in ways i know to be short-lived, for naught,
but i will let it try.

i will miss you when i wake up,
miss the silence that i thought you crafted for me,
but which was really just
silence.
i will miss you when i wake up as i miss you when you are next to me.
i want, for us, something infinite:
that which we cannot have and which you do not want,
hard as i wish you did.

but.
the sun rises —
i know how this goes —
and the misplaced light finds its place again.
the silence i thought you crafted for me, which was really just
silence,
becomes noise.
hectic. colorful without order.
i will miss you when i wake up,
but what ache is strong enough to pull something personal
from all that noise?

you take the morning bus to secaucus,
and somewhere in new york i try to live a life as though you have already left me.
if i had my way,
hopeful, futile grasps towards the infinite would not hold ample weight for a haunting.

and yet,
that old, cloying taste.

still.

(a.m.)
hi all. it's been a while since i posted on here. i hope you're all well. here's a piece inspired by 2 a.m. loneliness. i hope it's okay. **.

(for a.c.)
  Oct 2016 unwritten
PK Wakefield
"I guess–I don't know–underneath it all I'm just a romantic. I've loved (I will always love), and I suppose when I'm dead someday that will only be what's left: some vague echo of a moment I shared with someone. But really, and truthfully, I loved them in that moment.

And I will live, who knows how long, but I will live and I will carry in my heart those moments. The tasting and touching of those moments. I will hold them in my heart, and in my own way, I will always love them. Each one. Each moment and tongue.

It is sad and it is wonderful–that I got to have any of them at all, and that I got to have none of them. But that's probably on me–I'm not always the best person.  

I don't know, I guess I'll just keep trying. But please know I loved them. All of them, in their own way.

I'm sorry for who I am. I'm sorry if I ****** up. I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to taste someone's skin and live.

Maybe tomorrow I'll die. Who knows.

Anyway, I love you. Goodnight."
unwritten Sep 2016
my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something
i should already know.
and when she says it,
the shift inside me is something i wish i could compare
to the grinding of tectonic plates,
if only i were strong enough to bring about an earthquake.

but since i am a stranger even to aftershocks,
i keep quiet.
my earthquake is stillborn,
expressed instead as a nod,
as a chewing of the lip,
as a silent, compliant “mhm.”
and the urge that nestles itself at the pit of my stomach
is not an urge to disagree;
it is an urge to forget.

because my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something i should already know,
and she says it in a way that is not meant to make me feel incomplete,
but it is a way that still does,
and if i can forget this,
even for a moment,
i can forget that i am not okay.

i do not like not being okay;
i do not like having problems,
and my psychiatrist,
she tells me i have holes in me and she says it
as though it is a problem.

and so begins a slow disintegration:
i become but a bearer of problems,
a garden growing only weeds —
something in need of fixing.
i see myself a war-torn landscape,
dry and cracked and lacking life.
i see myself the kind of ground you step on and say,
“remember when things used to grow here?
remember when it used to be green?”

i am still trying to be green,
always trying to be green,
but my psychiatrist tells me
i have holes in me,
and suddenly green becomes a color i will never know how to paint.

outside my psychiatrist’s office,
on the wall of the waiting room,
there is a painting of flowers —
irises and a geranium —
and the leaves, i know, are supposed to be green,
but the paint is old and faded
and they don’t look it.

and for a moment,
i think
that maybe,
whether iris
or geranium
or boy riddled with holes,
maybe it is possible to bloom
even if you are not green.

(a.m.)
sorry for my absence. here's a poem i wrote periodically over the last month or so, from 7/18 to 8/30. hope you enjoy. **
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