What I´m asking of this world:
to drown my sorrows in hailstorms
to offer me grace and petals and connections
to carry kindnesses and clear-cut hope
to lay sleeping puppies on my doorstep
to feed the lingering absence
too much
We are not in this together, never were
Your castle trip (a sight for sore eyes),
made sure you made a profit
out of us, selling tarred souls
you never believed in
But people bleed their bones dry
over masks and mayhem,
they think of myriad ways to hurt each
other, hurt themselves, this much
is true, this much is sad and true
_
When the world went quiet, it started
speaking to me, I became greedy for it,
watching new days unfurl, brazen
tentacles reaching out to everyone &
thing that had been out of reach
Doors opened, birds sang, wild things
bloomed. I admired the flowers, admired
myself for the first time in years, swung sky-high
into clouds that did not rain on my parade
My belief in all of this, in spite of all of that
One by one doors are closing
again, no access, no way to go
I return to a marooned land,
the parallel universe of
a screen filled with every life
but my own
RETURN has been previously published as part of @theopencollab performance on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSK5sQP8rvg&t=5321s).
Annick Yerem lives and works in Berlin. She tweets @missyerem and has, to her utmost delight, been published by Pendemic, Detritus, @publicpoetry, RiverMouthReview, #PoetRhy, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Rejection Letters, Dreich, 192, Eat The Storms podcast, The Failure Baler, Rainbow Poems, Wombwell Rainbow and Open Collab. https://missyerem.wordpress.com. https://linktr.ee/annickyerem Annick is currently working on her first chapbook with Hedgehog Press.