To be a poet there needs to be a tragedy
A trauma hidden in the endless folds of your cowering mother's skirts,
A great happening in the form of your father's alcoholism and abusive tendencies.

Or that's what they say.

I have no trauma. No grief-stricken past with needle-sharp memories that ***** my eyes like tears when I go to bed every night.

Who's to say that in order to feel this deep sense of nothing that there needs to be a huge something that came before it? What if there's a happy childhood and a beautifully achieved mother married to a gruff but grateful father and two dogs with lolling tongues and a house with the perfect screened in porch that the poet spent hours with her dad on, reading the rites of childhood competency disguised as "Goodnight Moon" and "I'll Love You Forever"?

I have no trauma, no stomach twisting horror that made me realize my ****** was best torn out of me or that being a mother is pain inside of its own pain? I am a poet but am I real poet if I don't talk about the night I almost threw up the memories of my smiling father into my transparent hands, just because I felt too sad to deserve them? Am I real poet if I can't write about tearing the thought of my dog lazing in the sun on the perfect edge of an afternoon out of my head just because something so pure was never meant for something like me, something so unpure.

To be a poet there needs to be a tragedy
A trauma tangled in the Great Awakening of teen angst and the realization of all that is not your mother's soft voice waking you up every sunrise
A great happening in the form of losing all sense of self and filling the Void with the copper taste of pennies and nights that border on mornings.