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Em Halvorson Mar 2018
In a moment as brief as an intake of breath,
We broke. Whatever capacity or state of being
We held ourselves in, has shattered
I see you cracked on the floor, I cut
My soles on your pieces.

My vision for you, snipped clean
Set off with the wind to an unknown fate,
I would have given you the air to float
Wherever you wanted to go.

But no, that wasn’t in our cards.
Despite the intricacy of our weaving threads,
We no longer cross over one another.
Em Halvorson Jun 2017
My father exited our home
Stumbling, limping,
Draped in green terry cloth towards
An engulfing blaze.
They hauled buckets across their backs,
praying for help from the skies above,
Broken, splintering
Wood spit back at their cries.
We sat and watched the flames
Lick at the horizon, reach with wide arms
towards the treeline.
It’s going to hit the house,
My mother muttered wringing her hands
As we sat and watched the hungry inferno
Creep towards us.
Our history lay in ashes,
Blood and sweat and tears mixed
In the humid air
The scent of hot iron clung to us
And still does to this day.
Em Halvorson Jun 2017
Sparkling nights, velvet backgrounds
Memories are sweet in retrospect
When in reality we know
Those sparkling nights were a dark abyss
Set against razor sharp assumptions
But despite it all, i still liked it
The unknown of it all is exciting
Em Halvorson Jun 2017
Looking up at the sky, lanterns fall from
Distant galaxies, or perhaps from
Wherever our idea of heaven is
They pin me to the grass and light
my skin ablaze.

Alas, no burns grace my limbs as
Dewy grass blades kissed them away.
The crickets are quietly tittering
A trial against my being, judge jury
Executioner. Mother nature won’t give mercy
In the coming days

How far can my mind extend through oblivion?
Like an elder’s hand extending to memories of youth for
A taste of the past
Memories are always sweeter in retrospect
If I reach far enough maybe I can twist time to
Give me back what I lost in my creation
I wrote this about my journey with mental illness.
Em Halvorson Jun 2017
Before him, I thought there was
a cap on how much love
one person could exude.

I thought of it logically,
as if love was a
quantitative substance you
could measure in a lab.

I was confused and jealous
for a long time because
I thought his love for others
outweighed his love for me,

Thats ridiculous, he would say.
Love isn’t measured that way.
How so then? I argued,
Liters? Inches? Centimeters? Miles?

I suppose, he said, it’s measured
in the number of times
I can make you smile.
Em Halvorson Jun 2017
Things are wiggling and wobbling
And shaking and stirring and
I can hear the downstairs neighbor
Slam their door.

It’s all so infantile the way we
Hang on each other’s words
Waiting for some misplaced
Inflection and damning each other
For it.

The winds blowing harder now,
I can feel it. And yet,
The birds are still chirping even
During the storm.

Maybe they figured something out
That we haven’t quite yet
Maybe they are able to focus
On the fact the storm has to end.

Instead of focusing
On how long it will last.

— The End —