Waves
Moving to California is the worst mistake I've made.
I can think of least fifteen pretty bad mistakes
but this one takes the cake.
It's irreversible, the time
I've wasted here. How I’ve watched this life
float away from me
all silver towards the heavens,
some place I cannot reach.
I'm on my knees, I'm a glass sphere
full of tears. I’m shouting,
Don’t shatter me!
Don’t send me waves
crashing into the thirsty coastline.
Sam’s Red Dress
I’m wearing Sam’s red dress, thinking about
home. This dress a sweet reminder
that you can leave behind a place
but never all the faces that once stared back at you. How there are
some faces you hope to never forget. How some faces
were the only things shielding you from those bitter Minnesota winters
and all the grey clouds that tried to swallow you whole.
Trust me when I say there’s nothing romantic about this,
about the clearing of your lungs and the way
life forces itself through your throat. I’ve been gagged
fifteen times in the last fifteen minutes
and sometimes I find myself wishing for the final
suffocation, for all these breaths to stop weighing me down.
But not right now. No, not right this moment
while I’m in this red dress that once belonged to a sister
whose blood is not my blood, though I know somehow we bleed
the same. That if you slit our throats you’d find that the red,
like this dress, would pour down both our chests,
identical waterfalls with only a slight variation.
The way two sisters can have the same memory but not
remember their mother’s hair in the same way. One says
her brown hair fell in waves around her face, the other says she wore a loose
braid straight down her back. Either way her laughter echoes within their skulls
to the same melody, the whipped topping mustaching her upper lip at the same angle
and what difference does the hair make when the memory
is about love? About laughter?
You cannot mask joy no matter how hard you try.
Even the saddest days have something
sweet for you.
Azia DuPont currently resides in Southern California. She founded Dirty Chai in 2012. Her writing has appeared in Dead Flowers: A Rag | Bohemian Pupil Press, Maudlin House, Squawk Back and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.aziadupont.com or via Twitter @aziadupont.