broken things
Fremont, CA
2024, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
darling, you know you
are suffering from your
disease.
i’m not sure if you’ve heard
the quips of me and my friends
we walk to school asking about the weather,
joking about your mood swings.
because clouds give way to sun and sun gives
way to clouds and rain gives way to drought
and drought gives way to rain and you are not consistent.
the seasons blend together during
our time together and
i couldn’t really
breathe without smelling lightning.
i’d be watching tv with my mom
and smell a thunderstorm, sour petrichor,
and i could already smell the smoke.
i think you’re a little bit like me,
constantly unstable and oscillating.
darling, i can’t function in a way that doesn’t
make me seem crazy. “you’re acting a little erratic.”
did we drive you crazy? did we wring
all the sanity out of you? are we toxic
in our neglect, ignorance, are we dying
because we pumped poison into your air?
are you sick because we forced it into
your veins?
our inheritance is a legacy of
death, disease, and broken things.
Reflection
Reflection
I remember the California lightning fires of 2020, and there have been some recently too. The air outside would be cloudy and charged and I would swear up and down that an unpleasant smell accompanied it. It wasn't petrichor, it was musty and annoying and it followed me around the whole entire day. Then I heard about the fires, and I wasn't surprised. California is prone to temperamental weather and most of all, wildfires. Where I lived, we could never see the fire, we could only smell the smoke. But the lightning went on for days, and I carried the smell with me for days. I've lived in Cali for all my life, and the subject my poem addresses is California's climate. The weather here is far from consistent, and I've been noticing it for a long time. There's a song called "California Dreamin" and I just wanted people to be aware that California isn't some kind of place with perfect weather all the time. Climate change did that to us, or maybe we did that to us.