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Traffic
Sick of traffic lights and scrap metal,
cigarette
butts scattered over cement, and cheap coffee
bashing my head awake, I walk into work smelling
musty books I never give enough time to grow
vine-like through my skeleton, wrap around my ribs
and pulse like veins over my heart.
Trudging
through parking lots I theorize how
to avoid being mugged and hurl my body
into grocery shops and gas stations at
two in the morning when no one is sleepy
but everyone’s tired.
In the morning I hide behind glasses
since I don’t have time to be beautiful and even with
the TV off commercials yell at me
to cover myself with their product or fear
having sex outside of shadows.
My friends are flapping novels, howling
and inhaling two hundred dollars worth of drugs
a month.
We smack our lips about politics we won’t vote
against while escalating the volume
of the music and wanting nothing more than for
our art to mean something to ourselves
but refusing to say so.
When there’s a full moon, no one notices.
We’ve forgotten the look of stars.
We may be educated and graduated and papered
and interviewed and paid but no one
ever sits down in the grass alone anymore.
Traveling in packs we complain there are too many
bars and at last call we order another round as the
river slides
through this town untouched.
I hope to be poorer soon, biking daily
through a village and singing so loudly everyone can
recognize my voice and I encourage theirs.
Knowing the feel of each tree
within three miles, raising vegetables from dirt,
fishing for food, reading the words
of my friends, and taking pictures I publish
on my own walls could be enough for me if I’d
forget the definition of success
and let the earth remind me it’s good
to have rough heels and slow speech and
a naked face.
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Ashley Dent, having kept a personal journal since second grade,
is an English fanatic who loves to read and write fiction,
creative nonfiction, and poetry. She is currently pursuing
a degree in Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University.
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