Monologue of Despair
Penelope Alegria
Don’t you know I was raised to be forgiving?
The trick is to look at your grief sideways,
in between the eyebrows, never the pupils
whose truth could turn you to salt and stone.
You have to look at your gripe through a window,
but the glass should be dirty, foggy. Huff hot air
so it blurs, the outside blobs hard to make out
and easy enough to dismiss when asked
whether you remember what happened
that night. It works sometimes. You think
I don’t know? Nothing really stops the pain
from crystallizing, not even the steam of anger.
You think I don’t know that the wrong is there,
still, an eclipse that blinds, a Greek myth
that doesn’t let me look back? It’ll kill me. I know.
I’ll keep staring off into the distance until it does.
Penelope Alegria’s work has been featured in The Acentos Review and The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNEXT Anthology. She has a serial poetry column in The Harvard Crimson, and her debut chapbook Milagro, was published by Haymarket Books. She currently resides in Cambridge pursuing an English degree from Harvard College. Her Twitter and Instagram handle are @penelopealegria
© Variant Literature Inc 2023