Old Fort, North Carolina after Helene
Nobody asked you to come back.
You told yourself it was just to see the damage.
Just to see what would finally break.
The jukebox is still there—half-buried in silt behind the diner.
The glass is splintered, and when you trace the web,
your finger pulls back grit and a smear of blood.
She laughed at something you said, and you pretended not to notice.
You think about touching it. You don’t.
You think about “Fingertips,” the little Motown scream.
Whose music gets to stay? The song still plays in your head.
It tastes like the metal of the gas station pump on your tongue.…
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You belong to a yellow nowhere, the sleepless life in
a broken world—All homeless, soldiers, bullies—Weak and strong,
all the same people in the wrong somewhere, a swirling
cloud—Now. Look, listen. Holes in the sky, crevasse in
the ground. In the yellow nowhere, the between of the
nothing, sleepless and living—Homeless, bully, soldier, whichever you are
now, you were, will be—Listen. Look. The hole in
the sky is a door, the swirling cloud a path,
and now, now, you can leave this wrong somewhere—Now.
Look. Listen. Decide—this is the only now you have.
– Laura Williams…
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I thought I saw my old co-worker standing in line to get coffee
He was one of my favorite people, but I knew that when
I quit my job I would never see him again
Aside for the occasional post on Facebook
I smiled at him on my last day and acted as if it wasn’t a big deal to me
But it was a huge loss.
I looked at the man again and realized
That they looked nothing alike
Except for the wrinkles in his forehead
He used to talk to me through the partition of our cubicle
And got very excited about the littlest things
He would share his voicemails with me
And no one else
He worked with old people
Delivering books to the homebound
Knowing that someday they would be dead
So he saved the voicemails for as long as he had the space to do so…
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From my rear-view window,
filtered through the haze of an overcast sun,
a trail of hand painted signs drift by.
Weathered planks and chipping paint,
promises of produce and shoefly pie,
cutting through the endless blur of
farm and field.
Miles pass by in this way,
undisturbed by the glare of streetlights
and the growing shadow
of billboards waiting down the road.
Who knew there were some many
ways to say the word hate?
One look across the horizon and
I find myself a hundred miles down,
below the mason dixon.
A little red town.…
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The maze is a list,
a catalog of ships
left in a garden
& everybody knows
they don’t belong
& everybody knows
if they had been left
on water they would
take us to new places,
but here they are,
all terrible weight
& splinter, pain
& loss, a closed loop
that makes knowledge
another colony.
– Darren C. Demaree…
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Absolution [1]
when the night winds down beside you,
indifferently, lethargically, like
a cat
and the wonderance pesters you
like a cat
to backtrack
the day’s density,
be it complex or mundane, dense nonetheless,
and makes you replay
every interaction
flip-book style
showing how
your consonants cut
when it should have glided, how your eyes
scoured
when it ought to have gleamed, and how
last night
you said you’d change,
how you’d vowed
to be less harsh
to mother, friend, and cat,
to everyone, really,
but especially
to yourself,
and how,
regrettably,
you’d broken that vow
today
again,
remember that
you can try
again
tomorrow.
and you can keep trying
again
and again
and again.
– Shawn Rampaul
[1] “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.…
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1.
In the canebrake behind the sea
where at night the crickets
become mute when we get close,
there’s a giant hand ruffling
the canes and the canes are
up again in a moment.
It’s wild boars—an entire
family, descended from the hills.
At the village they say the beasts are
confused, that the climate is
changing—but that is not
why the boars have come down here.…
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