A Voicemail Left For My Psychiatrist
Emily Adams-Aucoin
like most people intent on staying,
I am trying to love the world.
there’s a family of cranes
that stay close to my backyard,
even when the dog barks & barks
from the unwild side of the fence.
I am trying to be that insistent.
when you asked about the pills,
I didn’t lie. I flushed all of them, even
the ones I thought I needed,
& I erased the alarms ceremoniously.
listen: I lived through whole years where I only
commented on the beauty of
things once, maybe twice. you see
the problem, then.
I had to do something; it was desperate:
they’d been there for more than a year,
& I hadn’t noticed the cranes yet.
Emily Adams-Aucoin is a poet from Upstate New York who now writes and works as an English Language Arts teacher in South Louisiana. Her work has been published in three anthologies, as well as in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Rappahannock Review, K’in, and After the Pause, among other publications.
© Variant Literature Inc 2021