Words Unspoken (Palimpsest)/ poem by Robyn Hager

I tend to speak in riddles 
That sound like normal sentences 
To people hearing them 
I like to fool even myself 
As I have learned to understand 
That my impulsive brain is smarter 
Then my decisive brain 
 
Chills in a warm room 
Cold words, long days 
Bare feet on wood floor 
I feel the breaths of 
A thousand lungs on my soles 
And each one I've held 
Is pinned to a mental chalkboard 
One so dense with scribbles 
That you can hardly see my 
Poem written beneath it 
 
I've found three things today: 
Blueprints of my desk 
Hazel eyes, pine nut lips 
My grandmother's recipes 
 
I forgot to mention 
That I found 
The word I was looking for 
 
Concubinage 
No, 
Decoupled. 

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Robyn Hager grew up in Morris County, New Jersey before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2017. She pursued her passion for creative writing and the arts at SUNY New Paltz and graduated with her MA in Creative Writing in May 2022. Her first poetry collection, "Sewage Flowers", was published in the summer of 2019, and her work has also been published in the 2020 and 2021 editions of The Stonesthrow Review and the 2022 edition of The Shawangunk Review. She has edited for the 2021 edition of The Stonesthrow Review and is currently editing an anthology of work by her peers that is set to be published in the summer of 2022.

Read a book review by Robyn Hager in this issue.