Five American Sentences

To prove to an unseen someone, a future self, that I am enough.

A loved one drowning, just out of hands’ reach; hover your hand above a flame.

That person is gone from this earth, what we could’ve evolved to is finished.

You are now in this world without his esteem, untethered, the string snapped.

I too, someday, will end, & this forgetting is a kind of freedom.

From Relinquenda: Poems by Alexandra Lytton Regalado. Copyright © 2022 by Alexandra Lytton Regalado. Used with permission from Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts.