in parentheses

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse writer from Colorado who believes that freedom of expression is necessary for a society that is not only safe but flourishing. She helps her readers feel seen in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun and, increasingly, less captured media outlets. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

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Gaffes Will Be The Glory

To err is human, to something is divine.
I could Google it.
But I have a problem with the whole set up.

Pit human against divine, it’s obvious:
humans lose every time.
But where it goes from there—I’ve had enough.

The planet would be better without us.
Machines can do everything better than humans.
Humans are only special in how much we suck.

What happened? Why do so many of us hate us
enough to believe the world would be better human free?
Is being human not enough to console us in our relentless flaws?

To err is human? More like to self-loathe is human.
Can I plead for healing without accusations of
centering humanness, species ranking and whatever else?

It’s no wonder we are marching dead on into division,
destruction, dystopia. Do we really see no flaws
in our plot to mechanize all the things?

It’s a plan humans came up with, after all.
But mistakes are not gnats to be blotted out.
They keep it real. They mean we’re not machines.

They give us so many chances to forgive ourselves.
To try again. For a species not so contorted with distress,
that would be balm.

And You Are Free

You are not on the runway to the alien
faux-oasis architected by dispassionate forces
that see the humanity of humanity as the final obstacle.

But show your smile to the stranger,
offer your hand to a human dying alone,
round your arms around one you love, squeeze

and you are free.
You are not reducible to anything monetizable,
you are not shedding data like dandrief.

Get close to your fellow humans and you are free.
Breathe with no barriers and you are free.
It is not (yet) as they say: you are free.

Timber

The US is the fourth-largest exporter of forest
products in the world: $9.7b in 2015.
Ergo, money does grow on trees.
Indeed, it is made of their bodies.

Ergo when a tree falls in a forest,
the trees will hold a moment of silence
for one of their own whether any human
is around to hear it or not.

And there are not always humans around.
But we cannot they say ergo, we are alone.
Our belief that we are is our fallenness;
ergo, accepting embeddedness is us righted.

The Great Glass Party

We all want to be surrounded by ravishing.

But we are alive in the magic of this world,
which is whenever the castle,
however the hill.

It is time to celebrate that everything is connected.

Everything that is still here, everything that is not,
whatever the marring, whichever the color,
matter matters matter.

Life used to be the kind of uncertain that made the alive curious.

Paint is real, trees are real, lies are real, singing is real,
assault is real, love is real, cats are real, the truth is real,
rain is real, bombs are real, hope is, too.

Everything was always glass.

Time Never Tells

The flame from the lavender candle I light for my evening
prayers reflects on my window pane in the exact spot
where the bare tree is and I get dizzy with awe? horror?
panic? at this Moses moment (I get a Moses moment?),

which reminds me of the time, a week after I fled
thirteen hundred miles from my home state,
when a fat-ass fog rolled in and I could see three inches
in front of me and I thought it was the rapture and I had been left behind.

We don’t have fog where I’m from. Also, I’ve been left out my whole life.
Back to my burning-bush moment: I had been praying,
praying, praying, praying, praying, praying, praying for a spouse,
for good friends, for life purpose, for answers,–a life I could remain present for

and then everything stopped–paused, they said–and I was told
I had to do what my anxiety but not my soul wanted to do
(stay the fuck home and away from everyone) and, for the last
half hour, I’ve stared out my window at the tree

that never bears leaves and is not actually semi on fire
searching for the mute button–Zoom is different every login, right?–
so the construction at the elementary school where
all the neighbor kids would be in the Time Before would stop

triggering the tinnitus I got from coming up to fast from a wreck dive
with my dad in Mexico yesterday, or, no, it was last year or, Jesus,
it wasn’t even last decade but the decade before that,
when things were definitely not perfect
but I was still as-only-the-young-can-be certain that, one day, they would be.

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