Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps/Carlie Hoffman, from “High Bridge Park,” published in Gulf Stream
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how can a person know everything in 2018 and nothing in 2022??
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Rita Dove, from “November for Beginners“
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me: *adds lmao bye at the end of my will*
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cross-legged in the dim light, everything was just right
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The Generational Warning
original poetry by Arden Kowalski.
The men in my family have a wasting anger
It piles up behind their temples and dominates
When they have children, like a disease waiting
to strike, like a ticking time bomb prepped for
moment of demise.
My grandfather is a perfect angel now.
When my father was born, they say he swore
to highest heaven and didn’t come back fully;
My father made a Bible out of obscenities
and carried the scar beneath his frontal lobe.
We visited my uncle last summer; his wife
had been pregnant and the baby joined us,
But I was really watching my uncle, waiting for
his veins to pop, his breath to shorten, his
mouth to shed human teeth and for him
to start exhaling smoke.
My father only had daughters.
So the wasting disease got me.
When I scream, I am looking into a mirror,
it has my father’s eyes (blue is recessive)
When I snap whips across my tongue,
what I am really doing is consulting
my father’s playbook (learn from the best)
And I am looking over my shoulder, I am
watching the devil’s chest rise and fall
with mine, I am wondering how much
time I could possibly have left.
Inevitably, hopelessly, I will watch a
stomach distend and listen to a first wailing;
and the wasting disease has never gotten
daughters before so I don’t think it will care
that this child will never be mine,
It will rear its head back and burn my synapses,
it will send cold blue fire through my blood and
drown the red out; it will watch me become the
monster under the bed I have always feared.
And I am young, I am still scrubbing petty stains
out of marble counters, I am still nothing but
sure that my fate will be the same.
You see, the men in my family have never needed
A wasting disease to justify unending wrath;
I am pretty sure the women in my family will follow suit.
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thinking about rage. thinking about my father, and shouting, and slamming doors, and quesy stomachs, and children hiding. thinking about smashing windows, and screaming, and the fear of breaking things, the fear of splitting knuckles open. the fear of being heard. thinking about the desire to lash out, and start things that i won't finish just because i can, just to see how far things bend before they break. thinking about taking deep breaths and swallowing all that rage down like a rock, feeling the soft muscle of my throat choke around it. thinking about how that rock has to go somewhere. thinking about how i won't throw it. sometimes i feel like i am made of anger, all this damned anger, burning through me with no where to go, with no one to hurt but myself. thinking about my long nails piercing the skin of my palms like some sort of pale imitation of crucifixion. thinking of rage and of staying silent, of staying silent and burning yourself to the ground. thinking of ash, and rebirth, and other myths.
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something something the poetry of science etc
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