This is golden day: a single moment that lasts for hours. I am standing in this field of brown, crisp grass and stubborn wildflowers, where the scent of summer stays. My feet are rooted in the dark earth. My eyes are closed, but my mind is open, absorbing the liveliness of this world.
I feel it, a certain heaviness in my heart as I’m making my way home one evening. Joy and Sorrow are very nearly always together, are very nearly always mine to hold—every mountaintop and every valley: my story.
Are you my friend? You have always cared for me, caught my tears, catered to every color I tried to dye my hair. You didn’t mind the dirt when I dug spaces in the garden, and I smiled at how gently you guided flowers to fill them.
Why does heaven feel closer in the woods? I ask that as if I do not know the answer. Maybe I simply want to tell myself why. The sky is closer up here in this tree, and the forest is where I pour myself out, always hoping, always asking to be filled back up—but not with what I had before. Never what I had before.
“Tell me, Wind,” said Rain, “you who catches me in your cool embrace, what it means to wander, to wander the world, to want no direction.”
I learned to bury myself in exams and exhaustion, in pink highlighters and black thoughts, in study guides and late nights, in straight As and tangled headphones. I learned everything I was supposed to be, and everything I wasn’t; I learned that I could live my best life and still see pieces of my worst.
The moon burned red in the deep, dark pool. The stars gazed down in awe as the maid strode down the ancient path, her fate engraved by law.
By Eliana Duran As the old lady sits in her wooden porch chair, She sews together a blue teddy bear. For years she’s sat in the shade of the birch, Sewing a bear for each baby at church. There aren’t any now, but there’s never been a drought. There isn’t much time...
Sometimes poetry stumbles. I think you can tell because of the way this began—not quite poetic, more like strings of consciousness tangled together like Christmas lights, the only exception being that I don’t like Christmas lights.
Those long miles down old gray roads, roller coasters on the way to roller coasters, coast to coast, talking in codes, the leaking pipes, the broken toasters.
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