I don’t want to be poetic

by Annabella Dlugi

I don’t want to be poetic
Instead, I’d like to scream and cry and
Show you my guts maybe
My intestines, maybe my brain will
Convince you how wormy and tangled and
Wild I am or maybe I should show you
My credit score my too perfect grades
My ocd thoughts of whether I brushed my teeth
Took my meds locked the door put on lotion
I don’t want to write a poem
Right now I want to catapult into a river like a
Rock when you throw it off a bridge as a child having fun
I want you to feel the mess that I am between your
Fingers, squishing behind your fingernails and stained
On your favorite t-shirt like a forgotten wine
I want to be inescapable in your mind but instead
I wind myself up like a toy and the child playing with me
Moves on and finds another before letting me spin like a top
Across the table, with all the eyes and attention on me.
I want to be seen and known and a poem only hides and enhances
Something that was already beautiful but I want to make
The ugly and muddy and chipped paint and rats in the trash
I think somehow in my life I was so intrinsically happy and
Maybe I don’t know how to be sad or mad or so deeply afraid.
I don’t want to be poetic or lie and fit myself into a rhyme scheme
Someone else made I would rather return to the
River and rain and the women that make me alive.

Annabella Dlugi is a recent graduate of Lawrence University where she studied English. She loves all things art, especially theatre and music, and is fueled by obscene amounts of coffee, friends, and water walks.