Tanya Tuzeo
Summer 2023 | Poetry
what happened to Tanya?
the best kept secret,
he wrote beneath
a selfie
taken where synthesizers
lit up the room
like a sinful city at night.
childless—
ecstasy kept in a drawer
where extra birthday candles would be,
domestic but
untouched
by sprees and schedules—
i still made Sunday sauce
though in a trance
from the after-hours.
marionette lines formed from
cigarettes and warehouse grit,
not the pout of mothers
whose puppeteers
split their jaws
from constant manipulation—
i was alive!
my freedom,
carelessly worn
couture
dragged across the floor
of unwanted adulthood.
he wound back time
scrolling my Insta:
a stage in Berlin,
later, my fist
through glory holes
plunged outwards in salute,
blowing bubbles in a forest,
Caucasus mountainside acid trip
turned them into butterflies—
content created not too long before
making sure
the q-tip jar is full,
all the socks a mate,
dishes in their place—
everything, tidy.
Tanya Tuzeo is a librarian and mother to two children and two collections of unpublished poetry, “We Live in Paradise” and “Miserable People”. Presented here is from the latter, a merciless observation of intergenerational trauma; a family wounded by mental illness in a post-war, post-truth society and yet continues to limp along, sustained by the vestiges of love and forged bonds. Her work appears in various literary publications, is a finalist in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest 2022 and longlisted in Frontier Poetry’s Nature & Place prize.
Tanya recommends the novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrille Zevin.