Poetry By Nora Rawn

Sean Benham CC




Can’t Keep Anything 
A Cameron Winter Golden Shovel

Go begging,
admit that there’s something wrong and
get on your knees praying, 
hope anyone is even out there to hear you begging 
lying prostrate on the floor and
giving up your dignity in the begging, 

you’ll lose any dignity in dying 
anyway and 
then won’t you feel silly, plus dying 
is easier if you 
reach ego death now, used
to it already, primed, hyped up
for letting your 
little preoccupations go as you head to the grave, 
you can’t 
take it with you, whatever you’re trying to keep, 
you can’t take nothing, I mean not anything 
at all, not 
if you love it more than even
your own precious sense of You

​



Golden Winter

On this winter Tuesday I would like to tell you
a secret, my friend. Lean in close to hear it better,
closer, yes, like that. In a whisper you hear me say: Start 
living now as if there is no tomorrow, because a 
world of wonder is waiting for you, it’s walking 
around peering into corners to seek you and you alone, babe. 

Everything in your heart, all the love
you can muster, all the bravery: it takes 
this and more, all already in you, for the miles
you’ve traveled to be rewarded. Love, 
of course, was the secret—I had forgotten. Will
you trust me? Will you come along and be
stalwart on the journey? All has been revealed: 

Your fear, your trepidation, aversion to being seen, love
of avoiding danger, desire for certainty, will
only waste your life. Make
happily the sacrificial offerings of what you
aren’t served by, what isn’t fit
to come along any further. It 
could be the constant catastrophizing, all
the imagined worst-case scenarios in
the world; accept their unlikelihood, that the 
glass is half-full, the tank too. Then get in the car, 
ride off shotgun into the dying 
sunset, the day’s full sweet close, and 
rebirth yourself by, yes, dying.

​


Nora Rawn works in publishing subrights and lives in Brooklyn. She has pieces published or forthcoming in Dodo Eraser, Dreck Lit, Hawkeye, Be About It Press, Burning House, Electric Pink, Burial Magazine, Some Words, and Michigan City Review of Books, among others.


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Donate