Life holds my head with two hands, talons spread wide with
prey in clutch, aiming my face towards everything that is bleeding
and burning, and demands: “What do you see? What do you see?”
I gag and choke and mutter:
“Anything I want.”
This is what my arrogance looks like.
My arrogance does not walk me into a room and tell me I
am the prettiest girl there, it has never hesitated to share a seat
or a cigarette with a stranger, it does not look down.
My arrogance does not tell me I am better than anyone else.
It tells me that I am better than myself.
My arrogance thumbs through clips of me retching
in unfamiliar places, of begging for rides and money
and a place to crash, and chuckles: “How young we were.”
She looks at a mistake we have made and tells me it is impossible
to do so again as she walks me up an unbraced ladder. She thinks
that my scars are like my stretch marks in that something in me simply
needed more room to grow—and yet, nothing was ever born
of the things she put in me.
Back when I decided it was time to take a break
from God, what I really wanted to see was if God believed in me
too. Both times I tried to return myself to sender He lost
my letters, and then when the angels of barely getting by carried me
all the way home from Georgia, all my arrogance said was:
“Love me more.”
That’s all she ever says.
I have written more eulogies than sonnets.
My Punnet square is chain-linked, my father is in ashes.
I know the difference between a garden and a graveyard better than most,
and yet my arrogance tells me that silence is golden when I suspect
it is only brass. Of all the violence I’ve witnessed in this life,
my arrogance is the most profound.
Today my ribcage delineates a preservation area of forgiveness.
But my arrogance forgets why forgiveness was needed in the first place.
— Cierra Lowe-Price, 2021