Forget Me Not
for Mag Hsu and Nao Emoto
Thin air between us, our fogged breaths mingle, and you wait
for my words to form from where they’re forged. Logically,
it’s thought the brain where each word is sent down nerves
like rain. Yet what I haven’t said is limescale in my throat. You
wait, eyes locked on me, you’re braver. Silver thread loops
your nostril, specks of freckles constellate your face, and I hang
on these things as I contemplate. For surely a word propelled
by exhale, properly researched, might reach your orbit and circle
closer with each decaying rotation and, either in seconds or days,
resonate. Such meteoric words don’t break from my shell, rather
they tighten around my chest, and my breath is off. The cloud
of your voice has dispersed by the time the plume of my reply
has left my lips. This, the closest arc of our trajectories, the coldest,
and each beat, missed breath, brings summer closer as we drift away.
Seán Griffin (he/her) received an MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. Seán's writing has appeared in The Southampton Review, Selcouth Station Press, Impossible Archetype, Dust Poetry Magazine, Non.Plus Lit, Sonic Boom, TERSE. Journal, The Daily Drunk, Electric Town Lit, and elsewhere, with poetry in [PANK] Magazine, The Mud Season Review, Mineral Lit Magazine, Ghost City Review, and The Hellebore forthcoming. Seán teaches writing at Concordia College of New York, is an editor for Inkwell Literary Journal, and lives in New York with three dogs.
*Griffin submitted three poems simultaneously: "Poetry Worksheet", "Hakumei & Mikochi", and "Forget Me Not." Here is background information regarding these three poems: These poems address themes of alienation, separation, and belonging. These themes, to me, are necessary as our growing digital connectivity and global awareness creates a longing and loneliness. Such feelings are captured in this work, and my writing in general, as I find I'm not so substantially in one box or another. As my surname might suggest, I'm a creature of dichotomies. This informs my writing as I use high and low language to connect the different cultures within myself such as the blue collar, literary, genderfluid, and queer cultures which are all vying for voice within the work, and I believe through my use of language, I’m accomplishing this. My approach to poetry can be described as Romantic poetic sensibilities in the style of the Confessional poets, while approaching the Nihilistic absurdity of our age.