I GROW ATTACHED TO DOUBLE MEANINGS

Written only using lines from random entries in my phone's Notes app

How I want to be treated and how I need to be treated might be different things

Make a decision tree

Tonight I kissed him in my dream and woke up kissing my pillow

Noting these small things will be for anthropological purposes for fearing forgetting

Maybe I will believe an ending doesn’t have to be a bad thing

In some dreams I’m losing teeth I don’t think they’re about fearing death I’m just afraid of losing

my teeth

Tomorrow I meet someone I don’t know her but I miss her I hate how attraction feels like loss

That’s a bad thing to not be good at

I get defensive when people say I’m obsessed Trying to translate love I don’t want love to be a problem

There is a flattening that happens

Are you sick of me yet do I make you long for who is next

This is my brain twitching in between time between tenses

There is a flattening that happens

I grow attached to double meanings

They grow even more clustered than I have ever seen roses grow

I often say, Imagine growing up here Imagine growing here

When I am forty-seven will I miss this feeling

What does this show about me thinking this question

I don’t know what else to do with pain I can’t let it sit

I plucked light from between the branches of a lemon tree tucked it under my tongue

Maybe this will mean something for someone

I feel a lot so much all the time All internalizations have to go somewhere tell me where can they go

I don’t think I ever believed the moon followed me Maybe it was just by chance every time

This is like from one of those movies people go to just to cry

Emma Sheinbaum is Co-Founding Editor of the genreless literary journal, A Velvet Giant. Her essays and poems have been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Juked, TriQuarterly, Metatron Press #MicroMeta Seriesand Glass Mountain, among others. The Poetry Society of New York once awarded her with a Pride Month Micro-Residency at Books Are Magic. Emma’s home is in Brooklyn, where she also enjoys making stained glass art and chilling with her cat. Learn more about her work here.