in two shitty days, i made these poems by Ahrend Torrey

/ day one /

 

i’ve almost given up on hope. 

i’ve almost given up on dreams. 

i’ve almost given up on everything— 

 

except for the child 

i see through the living room blinds, 

learning to ride a bike, 

a helmet over their eyes. 

 

it’s friday evening, in the suburbs, 

around five. 

 

their parent has a smooth face, 

dark glasses pulled over their eyes;

the most soothing lavender hair.  

 

i push the side door open—

let the dogs out

to their gunky bowls, 

 

then hear clapping, over the road—

 

you’ve got this, babe, 

   you’ve got this!

 

                         — keep going! 

                         — keep going!

 

\ day two \

 

i can sit here in my own misery. 

 

i can sit here at the edge of this bed 

with my hands slapped over my face, 

defeated, my spirit drilled into the ground, 

like steel.  

 

—or i can go to the cabinet, 

grab a heaping scoop of seed, 

 

take it to the field, near the lake, 

where i like to sit upon the rock 

and sling it to the shiny geese, eating 

from the showy grass— 

 

this, is what I really want—

to do something

to keep the world beautiful.

Ahrend Torrey is the author of Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022) and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat.