Absolution

Zoe Dzunko

BG-Broadside-Thirty

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.

Tiny-House

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.

Tiny-House

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