Prena Poetry

i once loved a writer till the day she put a bullet in her head. she did tell me she loved me too and often read Hemingway to me on soft sunday mornings.

then on the day we got married she planted a bougainvillea tree in her mother’s garden.
it was five summers ago.

her mother, she was a kind little lady who had learned enough from the world, but somewhere in a morning of may— while both of them were in the kitchen making tea, i heard her calling her daughter selfish for holding onto the commotion in her mind. we never talked about it after that and as far as i know, neither of them ever said sorry or gave a plausible explanation for that.

because maybe she also knew, she was—in a lot of ways, and also ungrateful to own herself.

she would tell me to start writing too. start escaping the madness in the world. yet i never once understood what she meant about the sufferings, and the madness, and the sickness.

even so, i loved her but then she loved the world; too much, too dangerously.

now i speak to her through my poetries written out of the sobriety i gave up.
i am in a different city— i am older
and still i don’t understand the intricacy of what she believed in. yet, somehow, everyday i wake up with her diary next to my pillow, i always drink coffee out of her favorite mug and put on the same old shoes she got for me.

i will always be in love with her.
even if i am to ask her corpse and all it would say is she ‘loved’ me once.

but today is going to be different. i will drink coffee out of my brand new flask, and find myself reading Richard Cory and singing along to Morrison’s “people are strange” as i drive back to her hometown

today, i will plant another bougainvillea
in that garden and maybe
borrow a bullet from her drawer.