BY JUSTIN GROPPUSO-COOK
I Cried Enough
To fill a small plate, eyeshadow running over the lip. I cried
from the absence of an overdose, abuse. Consumed
with a tongue bittersweet, I cried longing: Let me
marinate in the sacred & the sin. Cook me on a open flame
of mistakes. I cried in cups of varying shapes to see
if the water would taste the same, the curvature of
my knees refracted. Submerged in a depression
of pooling ink, I bled through the page.
Cried a river to cross it to you, my butterfly: Lift me
to the surface, drift with me to shore. You see,
things grown cold take time to thaw; I’ve watched an icicle
tearing up. Weathered through with a breath of light—
the frost of my muscle tissue melting with memories
of evergreen, these spaces lost within restored.
I cried possession into my palms, pruned. My handprints
like a fossil. What is this waking? Cried mirth. I cried at birth.
Cried for my father who couldn’t for himself. Cried out for a name—
the darkness. Cried for consciousness. Cried Anubis. Cried
Lucifer, Medusa. Cried as I squeezed pomegranate beads
& rubbed them onto my face. I cried a whole spring for the tulips
& lotus to hold their own. The fire wept as well—you know,
a well I filled with disillusion, threw in my loose change.
I cried for too much love. For all of the above.
For what I have done with this body: split
my radius & cried for the chitin of one wing.
Cried a perpetual state of morning. For the sorrow
swollen like cumulonimbus. Thunder. Cried for what I thought
was a casket. Turns out: a chrysalis. Called that chrysalis
my eyelids—my pupil, a pupa breaking. What is?
This waking. Flooding with light my vision: photosynthesis.
Justin Groppuso-Cook is a Writer-in-Residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project and Poetry Reader at West Trade Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, Crab Creek Review, EcoTheo Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and Rogue Agent among others. He received the 2021 Haunted Waters Press Award for Poetry and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, "Our Illuminated Pupils", was a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow Press). In 2022, he was a resident at Writing Workshops Paris. More information can be found on his website, www.sunnimani.com.