lauren samblanet - Two Poems

the poem

does nothing for me. i feel cut off to a certain type of thinking. i am afraid. the poem tells a story, shares a moral, builds a metaphor. i am falling back into exhaustion. sometimes this hum comes back and i think i can read poems again. the truth is that something in me died and i cannot resuscitate it. this has been true many times in my life. change is the only constant. sometimes the hums returns and i think i’m coming back to life, think the pain is gone, think the energy will linger. what did e tell me on gchat? can’t rest, too, be part of life? and the pain and the fatigue. then each little death becomes life. this is where the poems come back to me. even the poems, so tidy or so messy, so fraught, poking holes in beauty or putting beauty on a pedestal, even poems are life. i love what fills me with light and increases the darkness deep within me – or whatever the line was that made me gasp. remember when poems made me gasp? remember when we were children, our bare feet on the earth, looking at each firefly lit with light the way we were lit with wonder? on the couch, so fatigued, the front of my head throbbing, each tiny light in the room massive and glaring, i watch couples talk through a wall, fall in love in just days without ever having looked at each other. i laugh, i think how fake it all is, and then i remember, the wonder that bloomed in my body the first time i kissed you, how each cell lit up, a new hum coming to life, my body, my heat, your body, your tongue, the cool night air. how quickly love took hold of me. the poem hums in the night sky. i lace my fingers into yours and whimper when the pain is too severe to speak. what wonder that you want to hear my whimper. what wonder that the line breaks. that the poem goes on.

*i love what fills me with light and increases the darkness deep within me is from Salwa Al Neimi’s Seventh Gate: On the Ecstasies of the Body in the anthology We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (edited by Selma Dabbagh).

rhizoids

pressure like a storm brews against the walls of my skull, into my ears and jaw,

pressing a roll of nausea into my throat and stomach,

eyes go dizzy – like marbles rolling chaotically on the deck of a ship

i’ve been on a ship before, nope, just a boat,

like a dog, i stuck my face out into the wind from the front,

lately i don’t remember gender euphoria or days without dizziness

but i do feel somewhere in me that yearning for nature euphoria,

the autistic desire to not be human, to feel one with wind, water, moss, stone

from states away, lily holds me and our laughter and tears bring us to a moment,

i can literally smell them and feel their height as i hug them from miles away,

this is a landscape too – best friend embrace across space

laying on the couch, heating pad beneath me, cat pressed against my leg,

this landscape i go to when i can’t stand or sit upright,

voice note from jj like a blanket over me,

green light illuminating the room in neon moss tones,

you can make an ecosystem like this.

---

lauren samblanet (they/she) is a hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. they are disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, gender fluid, and queer. punctum books published her first book, like a dog. some of their publications include: fence, just femme and dandy, dreginald, bedfellows, and the tiny. lauren is a teacher and guide, offering workshops and one-on-one guidance through their passion project, reinventing creative process.