Featured Poet - Isaura Lira Greene
SUICIDAL TEEN
I feel like the whole world has gone nuts, that i have gone nuts.
that I am broken, and that the world is after me, against me.
I try to run away by proving that they are wrong, everyone i know
is successful. I don’t know what success means but it kills me.
I can’t focus, my head is cloudy and I no longer live in the body
my mother birthed. I listen to the wind, and watch the clouds from my
window, and suddenly I am no longer inside myself. I am out on the
street being run over, and over, and over again by cars that can’t even see me. It’s a headache.
F**k this s**t. I can’t get back inside; my bones are broken.
I am not loved.
My real body is lying on the couch, being what my mom calls
“a couch potato.” A lazy f***ing dunce, that’s me. The guilt deprives
my lungs of oxygen and my heart races but my muscles are as slow
and heavy as all the books that every kid is forced to read about the
history of the world.
What’s my name again, Mom? Do I even have a name anymore? It feels strange
to say on my lips. Well I can’t remember it, but I am sure it
has something to do with the stupidity of my parents genes
making me stupid. I am sure it has to do with all the rotten
scum that made this hell called earth, where there are demons
with sharp teeth and blood craving ... blood ... to make life
to live ... I need a knife.
UNTITLED
Sometimes I wonder what other’s see
when I stride out the front door,
how the madness emerges, and if
in some way, it arises in them anything
that is attached to their own baggage.
Perhaps I am attractive to one.
I wonder if being caught as a wanderer,
in a world where time doesn’t reset itself,
might be considered some day
as something other than a branding
for failure.
They say I am squeezing too hard,
too desperately, in pursuit of a goal
like any other goal, to either achieve
or leave as tried.
Before I was in school,
my mother taught me something
that society taught me to forget.
That whatever I create, is more beautiful
than the dream for the making of perfection.
For the fact is: everybody else has made perfect
but me, because nothing is set out for,
and achieved. The expectation killing the want to try
something new, we are history only capable of making history.
I had forgotten that the temptation to be an ideal person
erases the beauty of pencil smudges.
I had forgotten that writing was fun,
and the only reason that provoked me
to even try.
So for years I had devoted throwing
down
the list of everything.
While my mind froze, a vacuum
consuming all thoughts, all the lint
gathered into a ball as if wanting
to be set fire to.
My heat thumps,
with the feeling
of nothing,
nothing there,
almost at all.
I realize now,
that coincidences are tall-tales
that are not clues to the secret of the universe
and that finding them is a trap
all you’re given is a easy map
of the labyrinth, a golden key,
and a light source from your time
and place. Sanity is a small box,
and cracking it is what you must do
if you value your connections and are
afraid of everybody leaving you.
VERGÜENZA
The opposite of nostalgia is shame,
The opposite of nostalgia is depression.
Shame is the tasting of the salt in those little white packets my sister accidentally put inside of her “baby” coffee once.
Shame comes in the form of deprecation of the bowels. The behavior of the boy with autism who smoothed his faeces across on the wooden flooring as if it were cement. As if, in my mother’s world, he was preparing the space for some grand mosaic installation. Hoping that this is the way he could always be remembered years from now, his legacy.
Shame is the color of which the face warms after realizing you failed at the expense of the world outside of you.
Shame is the smell of one’s armpits after a running session and realizing you forgot your deodorant. Or the face breaking out into the constellation of cystic acne.
Shame is the dance of death in high school when most everyone is on the sidelines silently missing the night being over or that their crush might see them and ask.
Shame is the dizziness of getting lost in the middle of the dark, yet familiar city and trying to build up the courage to ask a stranger for instruction and being laughed at for forgetting.
Shame is the sound of a orquestra with several out of tune instruments and hearing the different shades of awkwardness on the faces of those who’d come to see us play.
On a ted talk, Brown, realized that life with shame is really just life without having a sense of belonging, a sense of safety in a sense. Something we all deeply wish for, something that makes us human. Every negative diagnosis handed out like a deck of cards can be summed up to shame.
But when I think about shame, I think of one of my favorite words. The world in Spanish which sounds, to us English speakers, much like vengeance. Much like the way the young woman Joan would draw out her sword, slashing out at all signs of danger to come to pass.
Someone mightily like Aidos the Greek goddess of shame, humility and modesty. Of course, even then, it was considered a more feminine quality to feel like this. To express, and listen to the watercolor waves of which a dolphin serfs.
Shame is a message to the human mind, a message given in the hushes: it’s unequal to notice the differences. It’s unequal to be ashamed of the colors.
UNTITLED
Inside of me
Exists a slice of hope
Lives a duress
a reminder of kindness
Shattered soul
of smoked marijuanna leaves
As if of split mind
we delete trough broken seems
A knife sliding through
skin
Gorgonzola cheese.
Ripe and raw smells
My mind has made
up another dream
A utopic mess of me
a chaotic nihilistic world
Suffering in silence
a gag in my mouth
Only known to those
can bear the price
Who i grant my trust;
to keep a promise
Now turn the light on
have a bonfire with close friends
Moth flutter flirtatiously
believing in the legends of the sun
In a dance of a latin kind
we celebrate with maracas
I open up my book
for on the very first page
my reading glasses on
bridges were made.
And I began this tale
at a beach, the water is cold
a gift we create for
Before the night of a full moon
our ancestors with
Sand-paper tongues dip
theirs toes; anthropology
To quench their thirsts for
carving artwork into wood
Freedom, they decide to sing:
so one of this time
We fight, we rise
so we can survive.
ABOUT THE POEMS:
"The poems and prose in this collection move through mental illness, shame, dissociation, perfectionism, isolation, and the difficult process of finding a sense of belonging within one's own body. Some of the pieces are intentionally fragmented because the experiences they describe were fragmented themselves. I wanted the language to reflect the confusion of losing track of who you are, where you are, and whether you can trust your own mind. At the same time, I do not want these pieces to exist only in darkness. Throughout the collection, there are small attempts at reaching outward: friendship, memory, language, nature, creativity, and the possibility of being understood."
ABOUT ISAURA
Isaura is especially interested in the relationship between mental health and language, exploring the physical and the cultural: a sensation, a memory, a social experience, and ultimately a question of belonging. Moving between English and Spanish is part of that exploration. She hopes her poems can contribute, in however small a way, to that larger conversation—and perhaps remind another person who feels isolated that their experience can be put into words, shared, and heard.
