Summer 2024 | Poetry
When Your Spirit Feels Overcrowded
One way to shake off the rising brick wall
is to head into the part of the flat city
built like a movie set
and watch the cameras whirl around you
as your hair blows in your mouth;
as you dodge more and more tourists with backpacks.
Be forever a traveler in an old, familiar home,
on the verge of losing your language,
cameras whirling above you,
loaded with memories of places
where you don’t know where you want to be.
When the new construction comes for you,
stay moving.
Stay in disguise as someone open to this business;
stay ahead of the box-in.
If shaking doesn’t loosen the bricks,
lose your nerves in the corners of town
built for people to get restaurant jobs and wait.
Swallow yourself in the seas
where the wishing is so hard it bruises your face—
wishing outside your wishing;
swallowing outside your self being swallowed.
Then, top it off with the time-perfected trick
everyone else uses in this place:
Drown your doubt.
Fill the water to the top.
When nightfall transfers slanting sun into glass bulbs
and the street dust disappears finally into the dark,
be softer again and again,
until your old self catches up to your new self,
and the unwalled roads reopen.
Auzelle Epeneter is a poet living in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Passages North, City Works, and was recently featured as the exhibition text for Oats and Weeds, an international group show at BABEL visningrom for kunst in Trondheim, Norway. This fall she will be an artist-in-residence at USF Verftet in Bergen. She is currently at work on her first collection, which takes place between Southern California and Norway. auzelle.com