momma, the left turn i should’ve taken
at the browning of last autumn
was swerved before. by a coffee table buzz,
or a chile pepper pod, or a stray cat
i made up in my head. i felt
nothing. i refused to deem it crazy;
i refused it to be a mountain peak
upon which there was no magnanimity
in telling the Indecipherable Girl
she was not loved the way she thought
she was. momma, my heart swallowed
a straight shot of arsenic and did not quit.
if only i’d known my wrists were a roadmap,
had listened when you told me
to fall asleep each night after writing a list
of all the things i let go. did you know,
momma, i read it somewhere,
that the neurosteroid responsible
for alleviating loneliness is allopregnalone?
if they made patches for personal use
i think i’d suck the meat from this earth
like it really was an oyster, mine.
listen, there are 315 reasons to go back
to Omaha and disappear. no. 1: i never learned
how to live without the gut-churning sensation
of crushing a bird’s nest in my hands.
no. 8: maybe i would have if you’d stopped
spoon-feeding me the almost-truths
of warped memory. no. 33: just forget
and we’ll go back to having a good time.
he apologized, though. he apologized and let
the air hang while i said nothing:
what was i supposed to say? every day
i collide with his teeth and the bruise
doesn’t heal. momma, i loved him
until i loved me. he left the next morning
without saying goodbye; he and i
have that in common. i hate to tell stories;
it feels no different from telling lies.
i hate to have such breath in me, but momma,
the pen marched on without me, a cavalry
of misused words like broken horses.
no. 47: if i was screaming bees, why wasn’t
i stung? no. 66: there were three of me and only
one of you—that’s why our paths diverged.
momma, i am tired. my body is a clay urn
and my soul waits to fill it. momma, i got so lost
i think i found myself again. momma, i change
my mind—i’d rather be a ghost than an ulcer.
momma, i don’t want to be known.
Decided to reuse a writing prompt given to me by an old poetry professor — to steal the structure of someone else’s poem and swap out the details.
I used “sundress: a burning haibun” by Winniebell Xinyu Zong. Really like how this turned out, it kinda shattered my creative block once I got started.
Lizzy Burnam 🐞 
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