Fear of Abundance

every day I try to find a new reason
for you to un-die

today Mathias is sleeping in the other room
with half a cantaloupe from the store
waiting on the kitchen counter

your sister asks if time has been dilating
in larger and larger dilations

Atticus asks how to believe
what they do is worthwhile

the answer I have for all of them is yes

the history of love lines up behind me

I worry about the ethics of
taking pictures of writing down
someone else’s name

the reason I wake up so much
is that I am always sleeping

we are eating the whole cantaloupe
as fast as we can

which is just to say
you could have wanted to be here

CL Young the author of a chapbook called What Is Revealed When I Reveal It to You (dancing girl press, 2018), and co-author with Emily Skillings of Rose of No Man’s Land, a chaplet from Belladonna*. Her poems have appeared in Lana Turner, the PEN Poetry Series, Pinwheel, Sixth Finch, The Volta, and elsewhere, and essays can be found at Entropy and The Scofield. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and currently lives in Boise, Idaho, where she runs a reading & workshop series called Sema.