All these years later,
All the sunrises and sunsets,
All the sleeps, deep and unstirred,
And you still make your way
Into my dreams,
In razor-sharp focus;
I hear your voice as clear as
The last time I saw you,
The outline of your lips still drawn
Perfectly as I remember them
When they touched mine.
So long it has been,
But no time has passed in my subconscious,
Your appearance a steady and constant
Stream of subconsciousness
That my mind refuses to forget;
Or is it my heart
That won’t forget you?
I wonder when, if ever,
You will fade,
But then I also hope for never
As I rush off to sleep so I can
See you again,
Where you never left,
Where we never said goodbye,
Where you look exactly as you did
And make me feel as exactly as I felt,
Exactly as I feel.

You are not here
You are there
You are somewhere
You are not near

You are far
Here is not where you are

I am here
I am not there

You are everywhere
I am nowhere

I used to be there
Not the same as where
You are now
But where you used to be
There was you
And there was me
And there was we

We are not there
We are not here
We are not we

But you will always be
A part of me

Dear America,

I’m really disappointed in you. It’s a harsh way to start a letter, I know, but that’s truly how I feel.

Our leadership (if you can call it that) has unveiled the deep rooted White supremacy and sexism that this country was founded upon. And that means that there are enough people in this country that feel this way that a man like Trump was able to get elected, that a man like Mitch is able to run the show in Congress.

America as the land, it isn’t your fault. You would’ve been happy to never have been invaded, carved up, forced to be witness to slavery and war and watching your beautiful indigenous people die and be culturally erased (in many ways still today). You are beautiful, with your mountains and trees, your beaches and oceans, your rivers and streams.

You are ugly, though, with your systemic oppression, kids in cages, Black people shot by police, housing segregation, gentrification, fatphobia, mass incarceration, capital consumerism, transphobia, misogyny, lack of mental health and addiction support, no healthcare for all, no equal right to education without stock piles of debt, and you always make a way for the wealthy and White,  but you box out anyone Brown without extra expectations or attempted White washing. You pave ways and repave them, neglecting potholes and broken bridges for those that need, deserve, should have them more. You are the birthplace of internal wars, internalized sexism, colorism, homophobia, racism; you’ve made us hate ourselves as much as you hate us.

America, I expected better with the version of you I read in textbooks. But then, that version of you was written by those whose roads were paved with gold, and they profit from its retelling.

I don’t like you, America. I don’t know what hope there is for us, but I do know that I love my brothers, sisters, siblings of all genders, colors, and creeds who too want to unravel you, America, and build you back up into something better, something equitable, something for all of us.

Maybe there’s hope for you, America. Maybe there’s hope in your (r)evolution.

-Meg

When the air is crisp,
the smell of late autumn and early winter heavy in the air,
crackling leaves and tree pollens thick,
the light begins to slip away earlier each evening.

I peer into the meringue-streaked sky
through the rectangle frame of
my windshield,
and just like that,
my senses take me back
as if I had never left.

Stumbling home on sidewalks
stained by sick from too much fun,
or not enough,
the fun I had was nearly always the mask I wore
to conceal pain.

I remember the way the air smelled as I cried;
I remember the sound of pumps on asphalt as you screamed at me;
I remember the sensation of wood on knuckles as I struck the front deck in anger fully broken open,
like a mallet had cracked me from within my chest.

When I hear the first few notes of song after song,
together their own playlist of
memories wanted to be forgotten,
I'm the audience to a fade-in flashback.
Sometimes it happens so suddenly that I feel nauseous,
as if my body was physically ejected
from present to past,
from the totally inconspicuous to full-fledged trauma.

Even now, trauma is a ***** word
for the clash of happy smells and sounds
against their violently depressed
and repressed sentiments.
I struggle to understand how
my rapid fire of shells and casings,
my broken limbs and oozing wounds,
my PTSD ignites
within a glance at an orange horizon,
an inhale of firewood,
an echo of windy gusts shaking folded leaves from trees.

Autumn is a battlefield,
but so is winter, spring, and summer.
Every where I go,
every season that sneaks in
and fades away,
every night's sleep,
every new anxious thought;
you slither in the moments,
in between the trees,
circling round and round
waiting for the right sound or smell,
anticipating the sights unseen,
hiding within my senses,
eagerly springing to life
when I least expect it.

I exhale sharply
at 70 mph,
and I wonder when, if ever,
I will be
free.

I'm just going to start writing because
it's been so ****  long.
It's January and 70 degrees,
which is strangely beautiful,
something to which I can relate.

I wonder whether you can consider yourself
writer's blocked
if you haven't even tried to tumble the blocks over.

I'm not really sure why I stopped writing
or when exactly.
Maybe it's because I fell in love and found happiness.
Or maybe it's because I didn't want to
write out admissions that a perfect relationship doesn't exist.
Or, better yet, that even at my happiest,
my most in love,
there's still so much untouched darkness within me,
darkness that writing pretty words can't even make pretty
in the melancholic sort of way.

Maybe I haven't wanted to write because it's painful.
I can fake the lightness when I bury
myself
in  the world around me.
Saving problems for everyone else keeps me
from having to admit my own.

Maybe I've been blocking myself
from myself,
like if I go too deep,
peel enough back,
I may not like what I see.
Maybe I'll realize
I've been the one to blame all along.

If I write,
if words spill onto crisp white pages,
if ink bleeds from the tips of weathered hotel room pens,
if I release thoughts and feelings frozen
beneath strategically built, icy castles,
if I let go,
I may burst open too wide
and feel too much
and relive it all.

Even my newer, shinier,
stronger self
might not withstand
the force of that.

Perhaps I'll open the gate
and pray the reinforcements hold.

Of the two lamps in the room,
my glassy eyes can only tolerate the dimmed glow
of the lower light from the right,
my face basking in the slowly rotating,
barely blowing air from the fan above me.
My face feels flushed,
but not from the semi-sticky early summer heat,
but from the fact that
every time I come back to this room,
I'm reminded of why I left.

The lawyer in me could generate a list,
pros longer than any construction of cons,
yet your name will always reverberate
in the unforgotten corners of my subconscious.

You never loved me like I did you,
and even my romanticized version of you never
saw me the way I
still feel the ghost of you.

I can still feel the crisp fall air from your balcony
and recall the albums and conversations that
complete the track list
of my unrequited love story.

Sometimes it was real,
sometimes it's real,
sometimes it's a dream,
sometimes it's a memory.

And this is the essence of you and me;
it's more questions than answers,
smoke and mirrors and
smoking to make things clearer.

I've never been the same
since you,
but I also don't know how I can ever
get over someone I never really had.

You were mine in microcosms
that were macro extraterrestrial galactic;

was it real?
were we real or
was it all [science] fiction?

They say that time heals all
but time has come and
gone
and come and gone again
and I'm still raw,
unstitched,
not even scarred,
let alone healed.

If I close my eyes,
my body transports so easily to
the times and spaces we shared
and the times and spaces where
I waited for you,
for a response,
for you to appear,
for you to even give me a single
solitary
syllable,
but even that was too much.

The hands of clocks have grayed into
a new generation
and still whenever I take two steps toward
something better that voice of your
nothings tells me
I'm not enough
I'm not ready
I need more of things I can't even
identify.

The more I know myself
the more I question why
I was never enough for you,
and I wonder if me 2.0
still wouldn't be enough for
whichever version of you that's been
installed.
Would you know me now?
Do I know you now?
Am I still not enough?
Is that what I'm striving for?

The door is closed,
but the doubt
is always
o p e n
for debate.