Cento from “Ideology”, “I WAKE UP CURLED UP IN A C.D. WRIGHT POEM”, “Mother of All Balms”, and “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” by Aria Aber & Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
The dead have the advantage of the leavers; those left behind have to have something to hold on to. I rearranged a vase of half-withered hydrangeas on the windowsill. Answers don’t fly around like words.
That, unfortunately, cannot be changed.
I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to. Those notebooks have blank pages. This ink, like memory. I could imagine rewriting life so I would be buying tablecloths and cake pans and curtains and flowers with Nikolai.
I would rather make pumpkin mochi.
All words are indispensable, don’t you agree? To have hours upon hours to marvel at words like driftwood, trope, misbelove.
Perhaps you should just stay with simple nouns like trees and flowers and leaves and birds and stars.
These words are all I have. Our hand wields this life. Another line to write on until my shadow briefly spills ink against cement. Words don’t have shadows, Mommy. You wouldn’t want people to feel sad all the time if you were me.
Aura Martin is a writer from Missouri. She is the author of the chapbook Those Embroidered Suns (Lazy Adventurer Publishing) and the micro-chapbook Thumbprint Lizards (Maverick Duck Press). Her poems have appeared in EX/POST MAGAZINE, Kissing Dynamite, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. In Aura’s free time, she likes to run and take road trips. Find her on Twitter @instamartin17.
RESURRECTION mag 