"I love you"

You say.

Coming from you it's

Bittersweet.

I always return the gesture 

Of course.

I do, after all.

But how can I forget?

The pain-

The sadness-

The depravity-

You gave me its

Entirety.

Before it was I who

Delivered the words.

The gift-

The poison.

The 

'I love you.'

You didn't return the gesture

Of course.

You did not,

After all.

You remembered a

Different call.

One bearing a 

Different name. 

One living in a 

Different world.

Away from myself 

At the cost of 

Myself. 

But now it's me and you

You and I. 

So I do.

So I do love you

In the end.

So I swallow my 

Regret.

And I look past my

Fear.

And I embrace the malice of 

Affection.

Just to say

"I love you, too."

I could ramble on all day about the ethics of all the things our country’s done. 

But I won’t. 

Instead I’ll say this one thing: it’s going to happen again. 

Everything he’s done, it’s going to happen again or at least, continue happening. 

With a president like him, how could it not? 

But we ignore this.

We pretend like it’s a one-time thing.

Because we’re too scared to admit that maybe it’s going to happen again.

Too scared to protest unless we have nothing to lose.

Stand up.

Say no.

Please.

We can’t let him win.

it stretches my face apart 

not unlike the plates 

we learn about in science class. 

pulling at my jaw, 

cheeks, 

lips, 

until finally 

my whole demeanor 

has been compromised, 

advertising the warm glow 

of my favorite smile. 

I write longhand.

Journal, pencil, print.

Letters melding together in a harmony on the page.

Graphite scratching the paper, pencil sharpening every 5 minutes.

Lined paper, perfect for doodles and random thoughts.

Neat and pretty.

No flowery handwriting, just the necessities.

Thoughts flowing onto the page like water.

Brain humming faster than the pencil can write.

Mistakes fixed later.

Spelling near perfect.

The sound of pencils on paper filling the room.

Clickety clack of keyboards around me.

But I'm perfectly happy with my hands on my pencil and my pencil on the page.

The red bike,

It just sits,

No one ever touches it,

No one ever claimed the bike,

After years in the park,

It lost some of its shine after tons of storms,

The rust comes and covers the beautiful paint,

The weeds begin to wrap around the wheels,

The bike doesn't look as beautiful as it used to,

But now it's a part of people's memories,

Just yesterday an little kid climbed up and pretended it was his own bike,

That's why it was placed there,

 I placed it there, 

All those years,

And after all those memories,

My wish finally came true.

i write poetry on lined paper

in class & only half pay attention, rounded letters

barely containing all i want to say. i use green marker

& stare dreamily into the yellowed margins,

romanticizing, as poets do, the weight of my handwritten words.

i write poetry in a black notebook

sometimes, eking out the line breaks with a nearly dead

V7 blue roller ball pen. it comes slower then, & in starts,

and i can only assume the poems want me to think

in between inspirational bursts.

i write poetry on the notes app on my phone

about the moments i see that don't need

paper or pen, only a line sprung from poetic depths

& recorded in that almost formal sans serif font.

i write poetry

in the create section of YWP, and lose it, often,

when the words spill & tumble out of me & i forget

in my haste to copy it down

somewhere else. probably there are dozens of poems

lost to the abyss, but what is a poet

if not their forgotten lines? their unvoiced stanzas?

what is a poet if not one to write?

We read poems on printed white sheets in english

Cover them with highlights

And words like freedom

Are covered in pink.

And a hundred years ago

People wrote for freedom

That they could taste on the tips of their tongues,

And then they grew up,

And soon they were able to swallow it

And feed it to their children.

I know from venn diagrams

Of walt whitman and langston hughes

That history moves forward,

Some begin singing

And everyone else will fight to get a voice

A place

In the chorus

And someday they will have it.

It’s not supposed to go like this,

We’re already singing,

You can’t take us away.

We’re singing this song

And it’s messy and no one knows the rhythm, 

Like prayers at hanukkah

But you’re not supposed to take us away

Now that we’re here.

The song’s supposed to get louder,

Prouder.

Instead we’re trying to sing as we read headlines in notifications

On our friend’s phone

Who subscribes to the new york times

ICE granted more powers

Minnesotan murdered in the streets.

And we have to remember

The america we’re singing for,

The americans we’re singing for.