‘ON THE CAMPUS LAWN’, ‘DEFINITIVE’ & ‘MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS ON BEING A GOOD DAUGHTER’
Photographer - Tobi Brun
ON THE CAMPUS LAWN
Under the green shade of a massive Maple
a twenty-foot poster of an aborted fetus
blocks out the picturesque views of spring.
This display of disembodied flesh
split open, meant to shock us
out of our young adultness.
The consequences of a human stain
irreverently hung.
That poor, unlived life
is what they want us to feel.
Shame is soft tissues, unsown,
in technicolor mega-vision.
Shock those Baby Bodies,
crushed in the political machine;
the shiny temporal intoxication
of co-ed independence.
The big consequences
of our lived lives, condensed
into thousands of copulating moments,
our millions of uncensored collisions hang,
with all their cellular baggage
in the spring air.
But even with all that,
we do not engage.
We ignore those giant posters on the campus lawn.
We carry on with our lives, unshocked;
bound for the tasks ahead,
the afternoon yawning away
beneath the green shade of a massive Maple.
DEFINITIVE
tension lifts and is also lifted
digging between the gaps of the old ways
language gave us gendered rules
embedded in bits of colonialized turf
they were dug up- fenced off-
turned into a private golf course
my lowercase i with its little severed head
is cracked away at the putting green
the divots of grass get strewn about
he him and she her grow wild in the lost rough
but time and space cannot be borrowed
and everything returns to junk eventually
we sing
i me mine i me mine i me mine
until it hurts and the words sound like gibberish
their thoughts float unsubstantiated,
all the articles escape into the atmosphere
they are at the north pole drilling the core
you are at the south pole observing emperors
MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS ON BEING A GOOD DAUGHTER
Tonight, she infiltrates my dreams
with that little sting of irritation from her presence.
She compliments my blouse
But only in that step-motherly way
that makes me want to tear it off.
That tension between us runs in circles
churning over hot, unspoken words
Holding us all the way through
to an end that never comes.
What I want to say feels cruel
to her now frail body,
she could never hear me then,
and now those words are lost to time.
That teen self
full of snark and exasperation-
has deflated
into a mature, understanding adult.
Still, I want to smash all the angel figurines
In the downstairs bathroom.
I want to tell her cancer to go to hell.
I want not to read the long letter she’s sent me-
her life story-
typed in italics and printed on lavender paper
with her signature curled out on the end page.
I want to be annoyed
at her full-bodied boasts
about vitamins,
or the tiny bags of almond powder
in the freezer
about how she’s never been bored before,
or what her higher-self says during her meditations.
I want not to watch her grow weaker
I want not to wonder how much time she has left.
Tonight, she infiltrates my dreams.
And I say out loud: “This is not my fault!”
“I’m not a bad daughter.”
I’m annoyed at the conversation we will never have.
The messy soup of feelings,
which boils too hot and cools too quickly.
Hannah Behrens is a poet, freelance writer, and writing coach. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. She is a native of Boulder, Colorado, and has lived in the Netherlands since 2016.
