I mistake ache for awe daily. Knew I was shattered since birth.
The hospital walls as white as the bone of my childhood best
friend. How only one of us would live past eighteen. In the maternity
ward, all my mother wanted to hear was silence. My father,
his favorite Sublime song. Instead their ears filled with the wailing
of a newborn. Some grow up to be a disappointment. Others arrive
in this world that way. I learned to dream of the future tense, memories
fresh like a bundle of lavender, girls with poems for faces. Once
I destroyed myself for a girl named after a flower. Now I can’t look
at gardens without thinking about the nightmare of my life that,
no matter what universe, every version of myself wants what
I can’t have. Like a rafflesia in a field waiting to be picked by a stranger
but never is. The stranger is me. I pick the daisy. Bears the name
of a girl that might love me in an alternate universe. But not this one.
Annalisa Hansford’s poetry has received honors from Academy of American Poets and 1455 Literary Arts. They studied poetry with Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the 2024 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. They intern at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop where one of their favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, used to frequent. WEB
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