Forgiveness

supposedly, in the sunken pools of the cracked cup in my hands, dwelling traces of grace shine like little diamonds- but all I see is coal. 

this cup is filled with forgiveness, a taunting fruit foreign to my lips

I thought if I put pressure on this wound, I’d see it better. But all I did was crack the cup; it’s scalding water bubbling and laughing at me as water pricks at my face

I know denial is a fool’s road that my aching feet have walked down- but I’ll never admit how tired I am. This cup burns my hands, and I don’t know where to put it down.

it’s not like I’m not thirsty

blistering diamonds pour down the open wound that is my throat as these grudges begin to die on my tongue-

this is the first step, and someday I’ll be able to swallow without getting burned.  

In my progression of writing, as I’ve told Professor Miller before, something I always get to do in poetry is feel out different verses and lines as I’m writing them. I’ll draft something, let it sit for a week, and jot down notes in between writing sessions. I come back to it when a week is done and let the poetry I’ve crafted write itself with even newer and better ideas. But with this project I got to do it all in real time while keeping myself accountable for what I was writing and how I could change it. I really enjoyed this style of writing poetry, I played with words and decided between which ones I should omit and which ones I should keep. Something I always do is try and write when I’m feeling emotional- and over these two weeks I’ve had time to reflect on things out of my control through this poetry. I’ve always been guided by emotions through my writing, so it always feels good to get them out on paper. Each day I just wrote about things that were going on around me that I felt I had to forgive to move forwards.  

As far as decorating my book went, I had multiple ideas about how to go about integrating my poem into a physical art form. At the beginning I wrote down general things I wanted to incorporate, and as the book went on I had time to think about which nouns stood out to me more than others- and how I’d be able to build off of them. I knew I wanted to do something with a cup and water, so what I originally wanted to do was make a ceramic book with each page textured as a cup you’d find in a house, but I had no clay available to me to do that with. So what I ended up doing was going to Walmart with my room mate and buying a slender vase that would act as the “cup of forgiveness” instead. I bought ocean-themed stickers to put on the pages and made it so that each panel of my book was plastered on the outside. I made it so that the first page gave off a vibe that made it seem like light, since that was the vibe the first page was giving off with the reoccurring noun centering around wanting to bathe in the light of forgiveness. Then I started adding heavier water elements throughout the rest of the poem, so I set up the pages as if someone was very deep in the ocean, and slowly surfacing.