The Hardest Part
This song teleports me back to another time.
The sun was high in the sky, and so was I.
The music drives with its lyricism.
And the days now are driven by algorithms.
I think about the things I’ll never get back.
The things I lost in the fire of black.
The zipping car on the unzippered highway—
We were unafraid. We were heartbreak.
The rolling laughs in the backseat—
How we spoke about our river of dreams
Everyone I knew was alive then.
It’s a surprise when the world stops,
Only to begin differently again.
And you weren’t gone, far from me.
And now the dreams are empty seas.
Such memories stretch for miles.
I compartmentalized thoughts and files.
I remember when we were close.
But it goes, we’re only ghosts.
Our blood stood every test of time.
Until blood bore no ties or chime—
Recording the Morning
A saturated morning. The raindrops create ripples in the simplest of things – waves in sequence, riddled with life. I love how the drops have a way of wrinkling reflections in the water, generating subtle disturbances like how wet clothes become musty, but never smell the same as when they’re dry. I wonder, at this instance, what’s the aroma of the sky like? Is it like soggy clothes, cotton candy, or jet fuel?
I watch the cardboard in front of the bodega swell and deteriorate under the rain while people scatter like wet cats with plastic bags wrapped around their heads, and I watch my steps, so I don’t crush a worm on the pavement. Everywhere I walk, tin can sounds flood my ears as the wet pellets ping on everything out in the street like a pinball in a machine. The tree barks darken with every wet sliver, and the rain makes love to the soil until it turns to mud: every hour changes and debates. Ah, the rain slows down the day like a hangover, yet the wind carries the earth’s weight.
Evolvement
1.
I’m not interested in teaching ways to love or even how to think it up.
2.
I can’t teach you about sacrifice or about how many times we die in this life while we’re alive raging in this deteriorating flesh.
3.
I want the unreasonable and innovative aspects of existence to clinch among the goodness and omitted parts of one another. I wish for them to discover the undiscovered.
I want to be taught and be on the receiving end of the million and one things I don’t know like why roses guard themselves by using thorns or why immortality comes on slow but heavy with disdain.
4.
I won’t allow others to share my prayer rug with me if I love in more significant ways than them, for I would be unfulfilled at an uneven heel feeling the disgust of unjust.
5.
I don’t want to feel less is more when I can’t give in smaller amounts as I evolve.
I.G. is a freelance writer living in The Big Apple. When she’s not trying to teach her cat to fetch, she milks her therapy sessions for poetry inspiration. Currently, her favorite poets are Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, and Yrsa Daley-Ward.