leftover

poem/a few words...

I decided to try something different for this blog post by including at the end of it the very first version of this poem as it initially came to me: Completely unedited and freshly peeled off my heart. 

As a writer, I’ve always struggled with over-doing it. It’s good to stop when you’re ahead, but I’m a sucker for loads of vivid details and run-on sentences. I dig deeper and deeper into words and dredge out more and more of the feeling. This isn’t always a bad thing, as I believe it defines my style, but sometimes it is better to leave some things buried. I like to lean into dramatics (as you will see), but I have to remember that there is depth in simplicity too, and it’s a buzzkill to over explain. This is why I thought it might be interesting to show how simple this poem was when it started, before I really dug my grubby little fingers into it (which I don’t regret).

I first began this poem at the end of March 2024, and it is now almost October. I sat on this piece for so long, constantly editing and re-editing and struggling to feel satisfied. Now that I've graduated college, I find that it is very difficult for me to complete things without the structure and deadlines of school. In school, a piece of writing would have to be done whether I wanted it to be or not. This stopped me from overthinking and instead I got great feedback from professors and classmates that helped me to complete the piece. Now I sit on poems for months, which gets me nowhere.

After a while of  not being able to crack this poem, I reached out to some of my old classmates to see if they could give me some feedback. They were so lovely and took the time to read it and give me amazing notes, which I am very thankful for. After a few more rounds of adding, subtracting, inevitably more adding, and moving things around, I have decided it’s finally time to just post the damn thing, because I don’t think I’ll ever really feel done with it. It is fascinating to me how many versions this poem has gone through, how many times the intent and direction has changed on my mission to figure out what I was feeling when it first came to me, and that this current version is very likely not the best one. Maybe I shouldn’t have touched it from the start (doubtful, because some semblance of grammar is important), or maybe an in-between version somewhere along the way nailed it perfectly. Either way, I’m happy to finally share it and be done with it…For now.

---

leftover

I see something in the smoke I exhaled
from the leftover joint that I packed almost two weeks ago,
that day I sat on the wrong side of my small couch
and it rained so hard my chest broke in two:

ribs cracked to the sky, fraternal jagged twins swung ajar—
nothing to stop cold drops as they
pummeled my organs,
drenched my lungs.
the thought of breathing
was incredibly suffocating,
so I exhaled more than I inhaled,
gave more than I took
that day when the sky opened
me up to reveal
I was empty.

I sat like that for days—
left behind and
pried apart,
my organs shriveled and set out to dry.
I waited and waited to fill up again, but continued to 
sit hollow:
a feeling of rawness
so intimate
that goosebumps lit up the inside of my throat
and crawled out of my mouth to make their permanent home
inside the crevices of my lips.

I sunk deeper into the unfamiliar cushion
smoldering beneath me
and choked on one thought,
then another—
when did I become the second thought?
I chewed on the third:
how many times can the being detach from the human before it can't find its way back into you?
suddenly my head filled up with smoke
and my mind tipped over
on the horizon of: do we have souls?
and if so, why does mine
seep uncontrollably out of my skin just so some boy walking by
can exhale me with the next hit?





that’s enough. time to
set it down, save the rest
for two weeks from now
when my chest collapses back together
with a wild crack,
my stomach fills to the brim,
and this second thought
second guesses herself
and wonders: 
do I actually see something in the smoke
from this leftover joint?

or am I just trying really hard to?

---

Version 1 (from the notes app on my phone):

March 26th, 2024

leftover

I saw an angel when I exhaled the smoke from the quarter leftover joint that I packed almost two weeks ago that day it rained so hard my chest broke in two.
the horizon of do we have souls and if so why does mine feel like not a solid thing but a gas that seeps out through my skin and gets inhaled by some boy walking by 
just to exhale me with the next hit

doodle from my journal

Written by Maura Kretzer - September 2024