Hello
I am here on this earth
Using up air
For what purpose
We are all given roughly the same amount
Right?
But we all do different things
With our breath
And sometimes we
Sigh
Scream
Sing
Stutter
Anything but breathe
-a.e
Category: Poetry
a poem: epps
On the way to Louisiana, possibly in the town called Epps, there was an old abandoned barn with airplanes inside. Driving by it once or twice a year for a decade will imprint it in your mind. Especially when you have nothing else. This was before smartphones see. So I watched the scenery and made up stories. About myself, leaping along the telephone wires or about that barn and the sad old lonely woman who lived there.
I was about fourteen, I think. Somewhere in those really awkward years between childhood and almost womanhood. For some reason I wanted people to feel sorry for this woman who was old and poor and lived in a barn with old airplanes. I thought people were really mean and would abandon her, and through my story they would be compassionate. It was also some kind of atonement for my own indifference. I too had heard the stories of kids who were young and had created businesses that helped poor people. I had the acquired guilt of being too young to make change on my own and no idea of how to organize any effort outside myself.
I saw my apathy as an indictment, instead of affliction. I still don’t know what it was. That’s why I go to therapy. To rid me of old barns and old women.
-a.e
a poem: my own room 19
My room nineteen is a space in my head. I go there. Or it is my writing practice, which I will not show to anyone. I give only bits and pieces and the dark spirit of the thing is kept hidden, a retreat from the world.
I would like people to
understand me but I will never show them my interior. We dreamers and dark souls appear as angels but
only our demeanor is. Beneath the kindness lies a demon.
I read that story and was afraid.
Afraid I saw myself
Afraid I saw my future
Afraid I saw my children motherless
Afraid I saw my husband widowed
Afraid
Afraid is all I’ve ever been
But comforted when someone writes a story about you across time and space.
1.0 You are (not) alone.
-a.e
a poem: writing
The blank page is a void
a black hole it
takes everything you
have and gives
you nothing.
-a.e
a poem: the wind is story
Today I stood in the garden for nearly fifteen minutes.
Just standing, just feeling, just looking.
It’s a windy day, very windy, the best kind of day in Texas.
I stood near next door’s fence,
with their tall trees
and their line of fir trees
along the back. I envy them their yard.
They have the tall trees,
they have the line of fir trees
along the back. We have only
the wooden fence, and drivers in trucks can easily see in.
But I stood, very still,
more still than I can be normal,
two hands around my coffee mug,
and listened, and wondered.
I thought fish must be like this sometimes.
We live in only a kind of lighter water, after all.
We swim in it, walking,
we hear the currents, wind.
We cannot see what we live in.
Fish must float sometimes near coral or kelp
and listen to their wind blowing,
feel the current on their fishy faces,
and marvel, and think, what a beautiful sound.
Wind and waves sound alike with your eyes closed.
Then too, another race living in something lighter than air might look at us and say,
do you think they know they live in air?
They probably can’t see it, not like we do,
the other would answer. It’s just their world to them.
So what happens when they’re taken out, and lie gasping?
Are they aware their world is gone? I think they’re thinking of not dying,
says the other.
Let’s just leave them be.
-a.e
A.M. EDMONSON 