There was a time when I went to great lengths to find

beautiful words

to make my poetry

beautiful

& you’ve gotta hand it to me,

because my fingers never

touched a single earthly

thing

Last week

I stumbled across a photo

in my closet

from high school

& on the back of it

was a sticky note,

messy handwriting

of a Pink Floyd fanatic

thanking me for

unknowingly assisting in a

project & earning an A

Black & white,

it’s the back of me

& I’m writing, writing,

probably not poetry then,

leaning my face against my

left palm

elbows resting on the desk,

messy hair before I cut it

falling down my back

I never got to thank

him

Just yesterday I overhead a

woman say,

You don’t have to be good,

just truthful

Emily Goff is a writer in northern Virginia, with work appearing in The York Review and NoVa Bards, among other publications. She does online tutoring and haunts many a coffee shop.

Image: The Dream, by Carroll Jones III, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46450859