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  • Writer's pictureEmily Louise Perkins

When You Complain That No One Wants to Keep You


when you are late and must walk fast

and they walk slow

you must walk slow

even if it means missing it

Miss it

because to miss it

is to join someone else in their walking

Am I keeping you?

  • Writer's pictureEmily Louise Perkins

when I love you

I'll ball myself into a gift and throw it at you

it'll be a ball shaped like your hand

and I'll look up from it smiling

I'll adore you

I'll listen to you

your little ball

bounce bounce I'm alive

bounce bounce I'm blue

  • Writer's pictureEmily Louise Perkins

you get to have the sun. the bees come from far and wide just to lick at you. you live in fear of the happy daughters plucking fingertips but even in that fear youre full of hope. you get to warm in the glory of the sunshine (its all you know) and you get to see how your bright color softens and comforts even the sickest, saddest, most pre-occupied of people.


but i, myself, am buried. i cannot see the sun (I knew it once) and only remember the buzzing of the bees distantly - i think i remember the sound by the way it made me feel - like a lovers voice on a phone call - woke my insides, lifted them, filled them with blood and longing. i also remember the tickle of light little bee legs on my desperately satisfied bosom. i remember they felt like warm water running over me or like i was kissing and falling into something. but now I wonder if it if any of it is worth remembering. i would perhaps prefer to know only dank darkness and dirt. to only befriend the worms. they have never seen anything. if only to know just one thing! to simply know a one purpose. to decompose. to deconstruct, change, rearrange, break down into simpler matter for someone else to stand on. nutrients for decomposers, how noble. and so then i would be, ultimately, the foundation for a seedling just like I was myself once. i could help in their promise. I thought I was more glorious and wonderful but I am no longer and Ive found myself here.


i do still have the warmth of the sun, although not the sun itself. it is now hot. it is now heat. I am suffocated. I am finished. I wish i had never thought it could be gentle.


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