landbleed/arrhythmic departure

nameless leash of the past I

landbleed

written December 2, 2022

my unfinished life is a badge on my jacket. i look at pictures of people i’ve never met inhabiting a world that could hold me, and they seem more human for it. i would have been human had i been given the chance. last sunday, i saw a repair shop in the slant of a food establishment’s walls, the nostalgia so startling i almost swallowed my tongue. it will never fail to surprise me, the bundled up rubble of my saddest comforts waiting behind the door, some rag doll of myself forgotten on the floor. every place is the same when you want to go home.

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arrhythmic departure

written January 28, 2023

think of your sister in the country that loves you. think of your uncle in Chile and the song on the radio; the shrouding hum of going for ice cream, of being late for school, of leaving a wreck behind. if the Patagonia has a face, i’ve never seen it, but the downturned smile of the hills in my town visits me in dreams—intimate monuments a camera can’t reach. when i wake in the morning, i know exactly what choice i’d make, though it’d be fairly unreciprocated. the country i love wouldn’t have to ask. truth is, if i went home, it wouldn’t know what to do with me. it would wring its hands at the sinuous wail i call a heart, stutter at the birthmark on my forearm printed in the contour of a continental absence. gone before i arrived. 

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revisiting old passages is always humbling, and i wince at the idea of inviting them to share a space with my newer poems. but i was proud of them when i wrote them and i can still feel that pride simmering in me, so i think they deserve to see the light of day with my name attached.

after all, these were some of the first words i wrote after moving countries and resigning myself to never writing again. rather melodramatic resignation, don’t you think.