The subject line of the email message
from the corporation posing as artisanal craft
asks if I am Feeling Nostalgic? I generally don’t
name emotions so much as embroil the motions
of understanding the arc of my life
like today
I could be a Republican strategist for all the blood
lust I feel around this email I refuse to open my nostalgia
so persistent even corporate America is onto me
Sean says
nostalgia leads only
to suffering and he’s right I didn’t really like
1982 and neither did you so let’s not lie about time
as a linear thing let’s call it a series of planes
not the kind
that fly in the sky
but the dimensional ones that make the actual
sky of everything so pervasive nostalgia warps
into a time-elapse panic attack I must breathe through
alternating the shallow
with the deep
would that I could keep everything yet remain
attached to little except for the part
in the middle I’m calling now
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 5.
Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, the founder/ director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and the author of Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books). She was a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and is the creator/ curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread. Her YA novel-in-verse, Alma Presses Play, was released in 2021. Author photo credit: Cormac Crump.
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