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Emily Ransdell
If you’re anything like me
you really don’t know how to age.
You assumed time would roll on
like a movie with a soundtrack you’d know
by heart. For a while you sang along.
The whole damn family sang like Christmas once.
If you’re anything like me you stayed
up late writing poems in your shag-carpet
bedroom, sardine-can dorm room, that first
apartment with a mattress on the floor.
You hurt your parents and you knew it,
hurt a boy you didn’t love and knew that too.
If you’re anything like me, you sometimes
wonder what became of him, you still worry
that you said all the wrong things
by your father’s hospice bed. Your mother
still shows up drunk in your dreams.
About the writer:
Emily Ransdell’s first collection, One Finch Singing, was the winner of the Lewis Award from Concrete Wolf Press and was published in 2023. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, New Letters, Terrain, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Emily lives in the Pacific Northwest, dividing her time between Camas, Washington, and Manzanita, Oregon, where she teaches poetry writing at the Hoffman Center for the Arts.
Image: A Woman and a Mirror. AI-assisted digital image. Proprietary image. 2024.
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