grossly sincere

i’m a lush field of grass

proudly standing in the yard

let me boast the beauty of the dawn

drops from god touch the ground

when sweat forms on your brow

and the bites and blisters and hives

swell your skin

you’ll know what i mean

plants still grow in abandoned greenhouses

clinging to the shadow of what’s left

over growth

climbs wildly around forgotten fragments

once nurtured, now lost control

come back to the dust…

captive in your natural habitat

“goldfish only grow to the size of their bowl”

why do i still feel so tiny upon release

i decline the power to be invasive

even the weakest prey have some power

About this work

This is the first poem that I got published at my college’s creative arts journal, Bartleby. It’s one of my earliest works, actually; I wrote it in 2020 during a rather depressing time in my life–on top of the whole COVID-19 pandemic! That period of time was strange, I never had so much time on my hands to really think about the things in my life that bothered me, and then I never had the time to express myself and those feelings until then.

I had a series of poems from that time, all about similarly depressing things, left collecting dust on the shelf. I felt a little embarrassed about such angst-y pieces, but I think they really captured the strong feelings of alienation and resignation in my life at the time. 2 years later, in 2022, I went through a transformation of sorts, leaving me depressed (again). Once more, I turned to writing to try and healthily deal with my emotions, and found what is now known as “empty.”

I didn’t know that my college had a creative arts journal. My discovery of the Bartleby and my rediscovery of these old poems coincided, and I submitted a revised version of “empty” to the journal and, lo and behold, it was published in the 2023 edition.