Tuesday, January 01, 2019

Tuesday poem #300 : Jane Virginia Rohrer : untitled


always comes back to who
do you really know
                                    in the end, it is
only ideas of the big thing, the city
shrinks whenever you stretch a hand,
although you’ve lived inside, beside it
                                    two hole decades
there isn’t much you have to share—you
are one slim sliver, meaningless,
of the human whole, &
your moms     dissolved into
album folds, school-made heart-shaped cards
before you
         even got to ask the big stuff,
the what was it like to break open, how many
years did it take to disappear,
                        what does it feel like
to be all someone thinks about until they form memories,
and by then they have so much more than you,
was it hard to let that go?      
i wanted
            to learn everything about you,
your softball batting average, when your eyes change,
what was your first drink—
    but there’s so little time, we’re already gone,
we hardly even made it here to begin with,
like the many building-ed view from a train window
                        it’s hard to remember all those lives besides yours
going on, always, together & not

feels good to forgive the good, feels good
to remember the bad, feels good to feel good skin



Jane Virginia Rohrer is a writer and teacher from Southeastern Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh where she studies sound, radio, and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Metatron, Bone Bouquet, and others. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan


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