‘in which the goatfish moon does not feel sorry for me’
— Joyce Chong
and i pretended not to have that first thought
because i wanted to be a Chill Girl. i am not chill, i am afraid
Today, we have a poem by Jess Rizkallah in Hobart that encompasses tentative adulthood, a sense of the unyielding in the face of things we don't expect, or don’t want. How to grapple with the things we feel despite ourselves.
how confessional am i allowed to be. masculinity tells me this is horseshit. / but masculinity aches deeply to be its own condensation this thing i drip too.
This poem is one part want, one part snapshot. The “now” moment, the trembling, ever-restless present. The ever-restless self. How to be and become, how to mediate your honesty. How much honesty is too much, and how much will spoil the recipe. How do we define the things that we yearn for? What’s not concrete, what’s un-spooling before us, untouchable. Rizkallah’s poem skirts at the edge of all these things without really talking about them; it only leaves you with a sense of something more to come, anticipation for the future, the tenuous, reckless unknown.
how do i say something without saying something. i just want to wake up one day / and stare into a bowl of oatmeal my cheeks already warm