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
