i have too many gifts.
That never stopped Plath. Foster Wallace, or—
poets I hate? there are choices—
That you make out of spite.
anger is a motivating force.
Anger is a corrosive.
anger is gravity.
It is a chance to defy what the world as it is
presents itself
as it should be, clearly, but isn’t—
anger is grief for the world in its beauty
unanswered. we murder
the world with our choices. we
complicit few
with ours hats in our hands, saying
what can we do? woe is me with my poetry
Stop it.
i’m trying. i’m trying to stop it this big bad
The world is not a wolf.
so why does it feel like it’s trying to eat me
in my grandmother’s clothing
i pick up Ba’s journal her last one before death.
scrawled inside it are phrases that should be
motivational but instead they are lines
from the TV she watched in her crazy
hallucinating peace or just seeing
pieces of script in the TV to write down as gospel when
really it was all words of gurus or politicians or liars does god
with her many faces
look down and cluck many tongues to many teeth like a mother
with her grin bared,
disappointed? my grandmother was a scholar
of words and she died with the lies
of others scribbled on her heart.
what is there to do or say in a world that keeps
killing grandmothers for sport?
in a world that takes sailboats and turns them
to storm? in a world
that is news, and news, and
Listen. There are so many reasons to not live. Pick
one. Go on. Pick one, and
try to get out of bed in the morning and fix
don’t you dare say it
your own broken heart. Mend it like glass
from the picture frames shattered and diplomas
scattered like what they are paper for bombs.
Take your heart and stop letting its pieces
cut you. Cut only you.
Cut the world open and take out the guts
and make from them a sail or light them on fire;
just find a reason to make the breakage
not the last stage.
Just find a reason to string the sail of yourself
to the boat of the world, leaking ship
that it may be, and hold hands
with the ghosts of your grief
and decide who gets to hold the ropes of your life
and let your death lie, for a while.
Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Shore, Occulum, Passages North, Luna Luna Magazine, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets. She is an editor and co-founder of M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird. She lives and trains in medicine in New York.
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