Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Here’s what they don’t tell you 
about poetry: every poem 
is about loneliness. Even poems 
about a woman’s smile
blooming like a flower opening 
toward the sun are about loneliness. 
Poems about war and killing 
and baby shoes for sale 
are about loneliness. Poems 
about mulch and chicken feed 
and calloused hands braiding 
sweetgrass are about loneliness. 
Rhyming poems, poems that bounce 
from the left side to the right side 
of the page, poems carved 
in cuneiform on clay tablets, 
these poems are all about loneliness. 
Odes, haikus, pantoums, and villanelles 
are all about loneliness. 
The poems in Hallmark greeting cards
are about loneliness. When poets write 
poems with their thumbs 
in the notes app of their iPhones,
those poems are about loneliness. 
When poets think of ideas for poems 
in their head in the shower 
and forget to write them down, 
those lost poems are about loneliness too. 
Every poet is born with a tiny hollow 
in her chest and every poet 
falls deeply, chaotically 
in love with poems and with poetry’s promise
to fill that hollow with a beacon 
but every poem she writes 
is about loneliness and every poem 
burns through the edges of that hollow 
leaving ashes in its wake 
and the poet keeps writing 
and the poet keeps writing about loneliness 
and the hollow never fills 
with light for long and the light 
never guides her anywhere, 
it just flashes to remind her what’s gone 
and the poet eats those ashes 
and the poet drinks those ashes 
and the writing lurches on 
and the frenetic pursuit of poetry 
is like a lit cigarette 
ground deeper into that hollow 
until the poet herself is an ashtray 
and the other poets come
to flick their lonely poems 
inside of her and those poets too 
will someday become ashtrays 
overflowing with the ashes 
and the embers of poems 
about a scorching loneliness 
that no poet is willing to call by name 
because no one warns them
about poems 
before it’s too late.