It’s time for another round of Broadside Thirty, our showcase for poems in thirty lines or less by poets thirty or younger. Today, we present a new poem by Zoe Dzunko.
Absolution
I adopted the voice of somebody
very hungry before a mountain
of choices, and never stepped
out of her. How unfair that it is
on earth I feel loved like this:
the way sunshine requires little
light, like day ignores lampposts.
There it is, in the grey guts
of my disbelief. Each time
you rebuff me I grow a little more
resilient. Today, I bent my own self
over inside the invisible cage
of the shower, it felt
lonely. If I’m permitted to
wear pink can I keep telling you
it’s a mans world. Wait, who are you
buying flowers for this morning?
My only hope is they are for
somebody unable to cut the stems
themselves. Rejecting your own
privilege feels more and more
to me like a privilege in itself.
I don’t want to be anything
with a history; what is the newest
thing that has not yet hurt
anything else.
Zoe Dzunko is the author of All of the Men I Have Never Loved (Dancing Girl Press), Bruise Factory (NAP) and Wet Areas (Maverick Duck Press). She is the Poetry & Short Prose Editor of The Lifted Brow, an Assistant Editor for Coconut Magazine and, with Sarah Jean Grimm, founded Powder Keg, an online poetry quarterly. Her work has recently appeared in Guernica, H_NGM_N, Bodega, The Fanzine, Two Serious Ladies et al. She’s online at: zoedzunko.tumblr.com