"I do things for aesthetic and not for reason,”
is probably the dumbest thing I could say.
It’s so dumb I peaked in high school
and wrote this truth with lead
for it to smear away.
I didn’t mean for those last two
words to rhyme within this pair of sentences.
But it happens I guess
when all the words in my lunch box
have been recycled
and all the sugar plums are sealed
in my mother’s canister only to be kept
on a secret shelf.
These circumstances do not pinch my ears.
I just fluff my pillow and roll over
until I rest my eyes.
Oh, what I would give to lust
after the sunrise
for going to bed at six in the morning
has made the emergence of
a star less intriguing.
Now it is part of the usual
but I gag at the usual,
the same way I gag when my breath
still smells like slumber
even after brushing my teeth.
So, we eat a bunch of Tic Tacs
or pride ourselves for drinking coffee.
So, we buy fresh flowers
that will wilt and stink up
the water in our vases because
everybody loves dainty little things
like heartbreak and nostalgia.
Is it wrong that I aspire to water
the plants I purchased from Michael’s
on shoe-lace-undone
kinds of days?
About the author: Amaris Janel Henderson is a 21-year-old writer and singer-songwriter from the border city of El Paso, TX. Henderson studies Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She has written articles and personal essays that have been featured in the Cornell Chronicle, Slope Magazine, and Cornell’s Arts & Sciences homesite. Her poetry has been published in Moledro International Magazine and TEMPO, the official peer-reviewed journal of the Texas Association for the Gifted & Talented, among others.
