hi all :) long time, no post, but i wanted to share some of the writing i’ve been working on in 2022. the overall themes have apparently been ghosts, loneliness, nostalgia, and growing up. most of these pieces are from a collection i’ve fondly been calling notes from beyond the grave. i don’t think 2022 was an ideal year for anyone. i tried to make the most of it by going on some fun trips, going to a bunch of concerts, and, of course, focusing on school. i’ve been working on some select long-term writing projects, but these are a few poems i’ve opted to share in this writing wrapped. most of them were written fresh this year, but there are a few that were written last year and finished and edited in 2022. i liked them so much though, i decided to include them. if you read all of this, i hope you enjoy, and thank you for taking some time out of your day to do so! happy new year, here’s to a (hopefully) great 2023!
January 2022
the haunted breakfast table
Everyday
I wake up
with the ghosts of
at least three people
who have shed their skin of me.
Sometimes,
we eat breakfast together.
(Broken)
I don’t want to feel it anymore.
(Broken).
So I just stay
neutral
because that’s how it’s always had to be.
I am a punching bag,
somebody’s forgotten daughter,
a memory that’s trying to be wiped from existence.
I was a friend,
a good one, too.
That’s how I remember it, anyway.
I must not have been.
Still, I feel the little girl crawling around inside of me,
clawing at the aching center of my chest,
fingertips poking and prodding on my arms,
under my skin.
She remembers who I was.
She remembers everything.
It’s the feeling I haven’t felt in so long,
calling back to me like a distant, familiar melody.
It sings to me,
plays like a symphony while I try to find the
(broken)
parts of me.
Still, I search continuously.
She’s somewhere deep inside of me.
When I find her,
she’s going to be the key.
April 2022
i am the ghost
I think I am the ghost that lives in my house.
I have a body,
I know it must be there.
It’s carrying me through the life I think is mine.
The body is visible.
So where am I?
The texts I send are left on delivered.
The body visits, the children do not respond.
The words spoken must be meaningless.
I am not missed.
The ghost stays where it’s left,
never to be bothered with again.
There isn’t a grave to visit when you are haunting
the living.
22
I’m the same age as you were when you brought me
to the pizzeria for our first date,
and I was nineteen and oblivious back then.
I didn’t know who to be,
I just knew I couldn’t be me.
Something about it was just too embarrassing to stomach.
You never got to know the real me,
I think this could have worked out differently.
I’m very different than who I was at nineteen.
What the hell were you doing with me?
Now I’m stuck playing a perpetual game of
pin the blame on whoever’s fault it was.
The way you left things was yours.
Everything else can be mine.
Being twenty-two is nothing new, though.
This lap around the sun will soon draw to a close.
You’ll always have a few years on me,
I should’ve run when I felt the first urge to flee.
I knew you were always going to leave.
I think I’m still in your dorm room.
I’m still staring at the white walls.
The feeling never goes away.
The ocean is ringing in my ears,
my dog is dying in my arms,
I’m standing on a playground getting burnt to a crisp.
The feeling feels more distant every day.
I don’t know how to tell you,
but I think I’ve found someone new.
Even if I haven’t, I’m going to.
I haven’t felt like this since before I met you.
What the hell am I gonna do without you?
Knowing You, Knowing Me
I want someone to know me completely,
to know all of me, wholly.
I want them to stay when they do,
but they always leave out the trap door I set up.
A fail safe for both me and you.
Because who could love me through all of the jealousy?
Here I am, mean and bitter and aching,
too tough to chew,
too big to swallow.
The only thing you can do is spit me out
into a napkin and throw me away;
pull the bag out and toss it into the dumpster.
Let me suffocate in the landfill,
drown in the ocean water that will eventually take over.
But they don’t know me,
and they still left any way,
so I don’t really know what I did wrong.
I never get the chance to ask, so I just watch them go,
and wait on the sidelines for the next victim to sink my teeth into.
Baby Ghosts: A Two-Part Poem
Part I
A baby died in November.
I don’t really know what to do with all the grief
that comes with that statement,
so I let it pool inside of my chest until it dissipates.
The grief is like a dam.
It’s held up high by my rib cage,
a little barricade for all my regrets.
It leaks out a little at a time.
I don’t know what to do when a baby dies.
She was suffering,
and we think of the wasted potential.
That’s what we’re trained to do.
It’s the same as any story goes:
it’s so sad what happened, I just can’t believe it.
It’s the same every time a child dies.
The death of a child is somehow more detrimental.
It’s December,
I still can’t get the words out.
It could be simple, just another chair to pull up
at the haunted breakfast table.
We chew on our words and spit them out.
We’re still afraid of how they sound.
Afterwards, I’ll plant the gardenias in the gardens
and water all but one.
There’s never going to be the right words
for what happened.
My niece, Charlotte, died in November,
and the grief solidifies again.
Part II
You would think by now
that I have found the words six months later.
The grief is in the air,
the chill running up my spine like Sisyphus.
19 babies died this week,
scared for their lives hiding under tables
in what’s marketed as a safe space.
The same thing that happened a decade ago.
I still fail to find the right words.
I was in eighth grade the day of the Sandy Hook shooting,
and my school had dividers instead of walls.
So I could hear the teachers’ whispers down the halls.
You can gather the kind of conversations that went on.
The day proceeded as normal though,
and I sat in a math lesson I was destined to fail at,
and then I went home to my mother crying on the couch.
That same chill lingered then as it does now.
Who will plant gardenias for those children?
Why do these monstrosities continue
when we can all clearly remember how it feels after the matter?
Where is your rage?
Is it stored in the tiniest urn you’ve ever seen?
Because it’s all about the wasted potential of these children
and never about the wasted potential of change and policy.
I don’t know what to do when a baby dies,
and I don’t know the right words to say,
and I certainly don’t know what to do with all this grief.
It’s forming a cloud and continuing to rain down on all of us.
I planted an herb garden last week,
the basil just started sprouting.
My mother always stares at me,
she says it’s because she still sees the little girl I used to be.
Now I stare at the sproutlings rising above the dirt,
and I think I understand the feeling.
I catch myself staring at the new life in awe
of how something I’ve nurtured is growing big and strong.
The parents of the babies who have passed
will now never get to do that,
just as I never got to meet my niece,
and we all hope and pray it doesn’t happen again.
Now all we’re left with are these baby ghosts,
roaming around the Earth, lost but not forgotten.
I don’t really know what to do with all the grief
that comes with that statement.
September 2022
Hamlet and Ophelia
And if I knew it was the last chance I got to kiss you,
I would’ve done it harder on that twin sized bed
in the barren wasteland of that white-walled room;
and I wished you squeezed me a little tighter
before you said goodbye,
spinning me around like we were in a great American movie
and I could’ve been an actress in a film scene
on your bed top with the fan blowing my hair around;
and we could’ve reprised our lost high school stage roles,
but the greatest role you ever played
was the one where you pretended to care about me
and made me wonder if any of it was real,
and I watch that show again and again in my head,
try to get the details of your face just right,
and the half-shaven night —
bravo!
I bet you tell all the girl’s they’re so pretty, it hurts.
Maybe you should’ve been a theater major and
I could’ve been your film study.
And I know this was never gonna last because
you never opened up to me except
that one night you were crying
on a sacred Easter Sunday that never felt holy,
or when you told me about the instruments you hoard in your room,
and sometimes I wonder if you told anybody about me
like the way I flaunted you like tickets to my favorite movie
and it can’t matter anymore
but it always will,
and I wish it could’ve been love.
I wish I was able to scream it just once.
oh ghost, thank you for the flowers
I wanted a romance that plunged into me like a knife
and ached when it left me for so long;
and when I got it,
and when it left,
there was an incurable hole in my chest that still lingers
to this day.
I wanted romance so badly,
I stopped romanticizing all I missed,
and tried romanticizing all my life had to give:
the way my friends and I sit around in the living room
of the dorm apartment we share, watching cartoons
that makes us nostalgic for a childhood we lost.
The way sunlight filters into the fourth story room
that I live in for half the year.
I wanted a romance that replaces the air I breathe,
but these days I know that’s not healthy,
and yet I let the thought of it paralyze me
to the point of never getting what I want.
So I’m going to be alone,
and the hole in my chest will cauterize,
and the apartment will disappear,
and I’ll never get those days back.
I’ll never get him back.
I want romance eventually,
so I hold hands with the ghosts that live on besides me,
and maybe one day I’ll be ready to let it back in.
December 2022
happiness after you
You’re teaching these days.
I hope that makes you happy.
I always wish that you’re happy.
You didn’t tell me happy birthday this year,
but you texted me at the end of May about something irrelevant.
It felt like a sucker punch to the gut,
but I know you’re happy,
and despite your lack of well wishes,
I think so am I.
I’m writing these days.
I know that makes me happy.
I’ll always write about you somehow,
some way.
I hope that makes you happy.
The Fitted Sheet Problem
I never learned how to fold the fitted sheet.
I guess that’s just the kind of person I’m meant to be —
the kind that half-asses shit until it’s supposedly clean.
The mirror’s clean technically but it’s streaky.
The clothes are washed but they live in the basket on my bedroom floor
until a new load comes through, of course.
I stay up too late in the evenings to finish papers I’ve had weeks to complete,
and the rest of the time I’m wide awake with thoughts of what could’ve been.
The Christmastime is supposed to be cold,
but there’s all this shit with global warming
and we’re stuck in a perpetual 40 to 50 degrees.
The sun is still setting sooner though,
the loneliness lingers just the same.
So, I’m the kind of person who hates change,
who gets sad when the sun isn’t out,
and I’m never going to learn how to fold the fitted sheet.
The poems are always gonna be about you,
even when there are new people in my life.
I have this thing about ghosts and how they never leave me alone.
I’ve been thinking about taking up painting,
it could go nice with the writing.
I’m not too good at it, though.
I have this thing where I need to leave some sort of mark on this burning Earth
or else I was born for nothing.
That can’t be true, but God isn’t going to come down and tell me
what is right and what went wrong.
Between me and you, I don’t think he knows anymore either.
What God is there anyway?
So, I’ll just continue doing my best at folding the fitted sheet,
and I’ll keep half-assing shit until it’s clean.
The ghosts will help instead of haunt me.
The best part about the global warming thing is that I don’t have to wear a coat or socks.
Bad things always have something good about them.