if I could be somewhere
I wasn’t I would be there
or I would have already
paid that place some
cold and charitable visit.
if you knew how wealthy
I wasn’t you would run.
I cannot remember
what I was before I tried
to become what I thought
I could in light of the
dark that swallowed me.
the story of how I thought
I had not been pure and
had not been enough. how
I was not there though I
had been but was gone
after what I did not
know I did not need
came. how do you fix
that which the house
has no tools to fix?
where is the resolve as
bright as the wet face
of a child, the sight of the
rigid origin of the break?
Copyright © 2023 by A. H. Jerriod Avant. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.