Poetry By Laurence Hart

        jon oropeza CC




Sorrow Is Not My Name
after Ross Gay, after Gwendolyn Brooks

I will tell you that my favorite season is fall
not in the basic white bitch
pumpkin spice latte way, but
in the everything’s dying
and sometimes I wish
I were, too, way. Existing
is exhausting and I feel myself
turning the way an apple does
once it’s been cut and forgotten.
I will bake my feelings into a pie
and eat them like a bear preparing for winter
but biologists will not celebrate my fatness.
Sometimes I swallow two tablets and pretend
I could hibernate, pretend
I could stay in bed
for three months or more.
But I have been mistaken. Fall
is not death, it is fertilizer
and all of this will feed a future
I have not seen, but know
I exist in
the way I know after the cold
when the world thaws
tulips and daffodils
will claw their way out of the ground
and the trees will sprout green.
The world will explode color
and is that any different
than writing poetry? Take that
which I thought was death,
was end, take what was trauma and grief,
and create beauty where there was none.
Sorrow is not my name. I am Spring.

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Laurence Hart (she/they) is a nonbinary bisexual dragon sitting atop a hoard of notebooks in Louisville, KY. When not writing, they are probably playing board games. Her work has appeared in Second Chance Lit, FreezeRay Poetry, Tilted House Review, and Just Femme and Dandy. She is the author of Disorders and Dating Apps (Nanny Goat Press, 2021).