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Hometown
Madison Yardumian

Dear Hometown,
 
I started writing this
With a dying pen
And doesn’t that say it all?
 
Please don’t run from me
Like I ran from you
Look
I know we’ve both moved on
It’s just
Questions keep dripping from my mouth
Like a leaky faucet
And I need to quell
The fire on my tongue
 
I’m just wondering:
How can you be so green
When I know for a fact
Nothing grows here?
 
Do you have a fine assortment of paints
And an artist’s hand?
Blending colorful swirls
Into the autumn leaves
Adorning the summer sunset
With a pink blush
Creating a vibrancy too shocking to be real
Yet so excitingly lifelike
 
Do you realize how much of you is empty?
Your houses, like gapey-toothed smiles
Are lined purposefully far apart
From one another
Because you are so fixated on
Maintaining              appropriate              distances
That children hold their breath
Transfixed by the
Quiet hum of absence
And nobody plays
 
Has anyone ever told you
You remind them of wintertime
Dressed in white?
If so
They see through you
Straight to your hollowness
To the dustiness of your dying roots
Languishing
In some far off sense of purpose
That tastes like history standing still
 
Do you know your trees are starving?
Stripped to the bone
Their willowy fingers shake
Overwhelmed by your frigidness
They are subject to the feeble roots
You exalt like a deity
They bask in the godlessness
Of worship without reason
 
Do you feel ghostly?
As if the spirit of something alive
Runs through you
Like a broken promise
You stretch into a world
That feels endless
And yet
When I look upon the gravestones of teenagers
I see the end right in front of me
 
And I realize three crucial facts:
 
  1. You paint the autumn leaves with blood
  2. You feel like a sunken footprint
  3. I am walking in a memory
 
So when you ask me
Why I’ve never felt complete
Just remember
I come from the land of empty spaces
And painted places
You know better than anyone
That I learned
Beauty in lieu of sincerity
Color in lieu of warmth
I watched you trace my figure
Until I became a jumbled
Collection of disjointed shapes
And now I know
How the sun makes shadows
 
So every day I find myself
Making art
In the parts of me you stole
And every day I must remind myself
It takes more than paint
To be whole.
 

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