My Life Closed Twice

Liz, I think her name was, the woman 
my mother brought me to. We played

cards in her perfumed office: lavender,
tulips, bowl of wax fruit. I was ten

and wanted to die. I don’t know why
I’m here again. I lived. Obviously, 

I lived. When I was older, but still 
a child, not innocent, but foolish,

I looked up from my solitary 
suffering. I learned the history

of men. I pointed to a spot
on the map they rendered. I said 

then, then, built my common life
in a room at the end. 

If it’s true, what they say, that poetry 
is written with the knowledge of

and against death, that it is 
a beacon, a bulwark, then Love, 

I confess, I have been no poet. 
Outside, a hawk circles overhead. 

Four cops circle a woman
dressed all in red. I circle

the apartment as you sleep, happily
in the next room. Just this once

I want so desperately 
to be proven wrong. 

Copyright © 2023 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 9, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem in the summer of 2020, in a fit of something like optimism.”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich