Speech from head to toe / The details entice the eyes / Show what’s within you
Talking Through Threads
Tag: poetry
Capturing Campus: Alternative Transportation
Alternative Transportation
As a child
colors dissolved
and speckles of magic
emerged
I waited for something
to take me away from here
But nothing did
so I held up a mirror
and imagined I’d fallen in
to a world opposite this one
grass grew from the sky
clouds like slippers
teary eyed turned upside
anger was to satisfy
a vendetta paid in full
My friend gifted me a book
empty pages and a burn building
in a chest beating
for a richer life
where pain isn’t pleasure
where people mean what they mean
where I’m far away
but home
yes, home
aSoSS 48 | Impulse
…at the club, instead of being fifteen dollars for a drink it was twenty dollars, and of course Trisha had to have those!
Sky Harbor International Airport, 8:30AM, 1/6/2025
mark the spot where we buried you, kicking without force, screaming without sound. in my hands, in memoriam–you deserve that dignity, at least–slammed against the earth, stone imprinted against skin, the divot between neck and collarbone which i am intimately familiar with: a cave beneath a waterfall, a cloak of caramel to shield the sweetness. you are not dead to the world, least of all to me, with your stare piercing the back of my eyelids and your smile shining against the moon–
You could go in a vertical line, you could go in circles, my sister just picks a random spot and starts shoveling…
Union + S. University, 11:00AM, 2/20/2025
displacement is a natural order. in three generations there will be nothing left of the world we treasure: one to prime, one to paint, and one to sit and wonder where it all went wrong. nostalgia clings to the heart like cigarette smoke, heavy and unyielding. i will name my youngest after you and pray they carry your soul onward, an electrical current through the family tree. you are quivering from the tension. an impulse, or an impasse? look around, grab my hand, close the gap. look around, whisper a prayer, close your eyes.
Born curious, it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble…
Yeah, that’s what life is all about!
SPCA Thrift, 3:00PM. 3/4/2025
the water is up to my chest, shallow enough to hear my thoughts and deep enough to drown them. your crown is made of sand and the palace has long crumbled–you are on your toes, chin above the current, swept head over heels. the ocean flirts and then consumes, a vicious cycle of birth and rebirth. the blinking dot on the horizon was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a four-leaf clover with a missing petal. the lighthouse is nowhere to be seen.
Capturing Campus: The Right Way
The Right Way
I could tell myself
I’m right
but there is no way to know
how I was meant
to turn out
the beliefs
the hurt
a mind in mutiny
the inside suffering
indoctrination until opinions
become ghosts
untouched and unfelt
preaching reason and absurd escape
packing the mind until stuffed and bursting
with hard-to-hear thoughts
was I meant to be this way
or did circumstance
bend me
into a familiar shape
aSoSS 47 | Timeline
We saw each other three weeks ago…
No we didn’t! I don’t remember this!
It was at the bus stop. Remember I went to Canada three weeks ago? We were making fun of Canada.
Duderstadt Library, 4:30PM, 2/4/2025
to think that we can live a thousand lives in the blink of an eye–one for each word, each feeling, a pixel of sunlight in the crook of your smile, cutting through the fog like a lotus in the mud. you are older now and the photo has faded from your memory–does this mean it even existed at all? as Forster put it: the king died, and the queen died of grief. just like a story worth telling is defined by the plot, a life worth living is defined by the details.
They didn’t have cell phones in ’96, at least the kids I worked with… life has changed in a relatively short period of time.
Jerusalem Garden, 12:30PM, 2/1/2025
we have run inside to escape, a one-way street with no reprieve. the playpen has been replaced by a touchscreen, a bright light projected from a black hole. do you think the grass misses the footsteps? such is the cycle of attention, the rhythm of the rivers and the stars. the same way the brook bends against the underbrush: restless, ceaseless, the water strumming the chords of river rock. the guilt settles and hardens like a gumdrop–the feeling has passed, but the dust has already settled.
Another text in the group chat! This man hasn’t texted us for two years and now he’s texted us twice! He misses us!
Science Learning Center, 5:00PM, 2/19/2025
an analogy: if the chef brings out a dessert and you gulp it down in one bite, you experience the short-term pleasure of the meal without regret. you pay the bill and take your leave; you live in the moment; you forget. but instead if you take incremental bites, savoring the flavor, your pleasure is extended–but so is your awareness of the ending, the certainty that at any moment you will reach for the fork and find an empty plate. which, then, is the greater heartbreak: to be ignorant, or appreciative, of the timeline? to lose without knowing, or to count each moment as it slips away?
–your breath shudders, for you know this is the voice of a mute and the word of a liar. into my ear you whisper goodbye in your language–i ask you what it means and you say i love you—
~Sappy Daze~ Day 19
An Unfortunate Cookie The only fortunes my family is okay with wasting are the fortune cookies we receive after we pay the bill at a Chinese restaurant. I crush them as much as I can until the plastic bag it’s in pops. I take out the slip of paper with the red ink that stamps empty promises accompanied by lucky numbers that were never lucky enough to win me the lottery. Then I toss the cookie into the decorative koi pond. I have more fun feeding them than feeding myself. - Sappy
