I Miss Everyone At Once But Most Of All--
by beyza ozer
( published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Volume 5, Issue 5)
name a mistake & i’ll tell you if i’ve made it / they were all so beautiful i could write a song or paint a mural / or cross stitch them into the world’s largest & most uncomfortable pillow / & i will give you that pillow because i am a taurus / & you deserve everything.
i don’t know how time zones work or why they hurt / i rarely answer the phone / instead i make lists— / ugly hawaiian shirt / turbulence / old man coughing loudly / sometimes i adjust my glasses when they aren’t there.
if this plane dove i wouldn’t pay attention to whose face i saw first / instead i’d hear every color & feel every sound at once / remember any trans person who has smiled / & every scratch my cat left on me / & i know the ocean will grow hands to hold me—
cold & safe like my mother’s when i reached / across my brother to hold them as she cried in the back of a cab / the ocean will grow hands to hold me & i still have trouble sleeping / since i realized that any picture i take of water is different / the ocean / grew hands to hold me the last time i saw my grandfather & when i say last time
i mean remember when he held me with everything he had left in him like the ocean? the woman in the room across from his was yelling hadi gel, come on now come on to no one in particular over & over until the birds started to repeat her.
he was all bone & fake teeth & i could’ve sworn i felt something between us like a wave of relief.
I like when the form of a poem is perfectly synced with the theme/topic and the tone, as it is here. The is one of those forms that can be overdone and done for the sake of writing in this form, but here, it fits the breathless tone and the stream of consciousness flow while also forcing the reader to take necessary pauses.
I also admire where this poem ends up and how it gets there. We are slowly introduced to the ideas of water/ocean and hands, and they become inseparable.
As with the previous poem on this blog, the speaker imagines death, but there is some comfort in that one aspect of nature will be welcoming, with hands like the hands of loved ones.
And because I like small surprises in everything I read (ones that are HUGE are too much, like a murder mystery where the killer is revealed to be someone mentioned in passing on page 2 of a 280 page book), I especially love a couple of the details at the poem's start.
"I rarely answer the phone" says a lot about the speaker as well as the time in which we live.
{I'd} "remember any trans person who has smiled" is also a surprising line, as well as being timely and sad. There is pain throughout this poem, but the idea that the speaker could recall every trans person who ever smiled--suggesting there are so few of them--is (if I am reading this correctly) heartbreaking.
I'll end at the beginning. You will notice that almost all (if not all) poems on my blog have interesting first lines. "name a mistake & i’ll tell you if i’ve made it" tells us so much about the speaker and the tone of the poem. And for those of us who seem to have perfect recall on all of our mistakes, embarrassments, and moments in which we acted badly, we can relate right then with that line.
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