Rachel Tanner: 2 Poems
But What If This Is Worth It?
It’s so easy to bare my teeth to growl
claw my way
through whoever you thought I was. I don’t know if I
believe in ghosts but I know what it is to be haunted.
I’m tired of always
needing to be
forgiven. The days fold over your absence until I barely
remember a time before you were gone. The shape of
my past leaves such little room for futures.
I can no longer feel hope
as it was, so I am inventing a new version of it.
It is a known fact that I have never been able to keep a plant alive.
A flower in bloom. How could you expect anything
but destruction from these hands?
It’s always someone. Always something. Always a little
past what anyone can tolerate. I know this is getting old,
but I promise I am trying.
I don’t know why I’m this way. I don’t know how to stop myself.
I can’t hold you and hold myself together at the same time.
Friendship can forget to be love and love can forget to be friendship.
We forgot each other so easily. We picked our teeth with each
other’s bones. I am trying to stay soft and forgive the parts of you
that want nothing to do with me. I am trying to learn not to kill
every spider I come across. How do I stop myself from becoming this
nightmare? We’ll either miss each other or we won’t. We’ll either
survive this or we won’t. Am I strong winds or a flood and is there a
difference?
This is an exercise in loving even the worst parts of myself.
In Some Ways, It's Simple
I have been trying my entire life
to invent a language my father can
understand. How can you truly
know someone
when everything is unexplainable?
We don’t even feel grief
the same way — he all anger
and me broken down.
If I could live my life over,
I would ask to be taught his language
from birth. I am doing my best.
I am making meals of crumbs and
trying to swim us both up
towards the light,
not even knowing what the light is.
How is it possible to be so much
the same while simultaneously
being separated by universes that are
too far away to imagine?
I thought I might be dying so
on my way to the emergency room,
I texted him and told him
that I loved him.
That’s really all there is.
Rachel Tanner is a queer, disabled Alabamian writer whose work has recently appeared in Bending Genres, Porridge Magazine, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit.