THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE

Angelina Nguyen, Del Norte High School, graduating in 25' April 19, 2023

Artwork by Yuri "Ticket" Lee, Del Norte High School, 26'

FOOD

Apples

Her single meal.

Impregnated

from consuming her insecurities

forcing down raw fistfuls of

marinated perceptions

to nurture a baby born of

self loathing.

Eat eat eat

Eat up society’s mangled standards

then cough up its corpse

until she is one herself

barely flesh and gnarled bones.

WATER

She is drowning in her expectations

and she doesn’t know how to swim

her emaciated limbs can’t fight the capricious currents

of people of eyes of a “bare-minimum”

defy it but be weary

she’s getting swept away and her thoughts they’re drifting off

cradled by smoke a mirror is a sea and it is vast and unfathomable

and she stares at the sea often but all she sees is the shore

where black oil spills at her toes and it sinks into the sand

stains it with the raw memory of pollution pollution pollution.

She is disgusted with the sea.

SHELTER

Her perfect world is in her mother’s arms

an embrace that is whole where she rests

in a crescent nook that is textbook “complete”

where eyes could be a home

because her mother’s gaze was gilded and

liquid fire sculpted into agates that

did not know the memory of anything

but unconditional love.

Now she knows booze and crude glass fragments

The flat and dense plane of a father’s palm

And she hears his spastic shouts tearing through

Hallways asunder and ricocheting off ceilings

Reaching her and suddenly she’s an infant

And she’s crying for her mother

SHE’S GONE

SHE WON'T COME BACK

She knows but tears burn the corners of her eyes

And her face is enkindled with embers of

house fires and clandestine memories

but she had hidden those recollections far away

Albums of play-by-play snapshots which

are vintage and impossibly evading corrosion

And it is because she can’t forget

Why can’t she

Why can’t she forget it

The poetry of her mother’s face

Engulfed in flames.

THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE

Food.

Water.

Shelter.

She.

Had.

All.

Three.

So.

Why.

Isn’t.

She.

Alive?