I’m sorry I got my hopes up. [it will happen again.]

by Wanda Deglane

It is May and love doesn’t feel real anymore. 

I’m locked in a room with all my loss. I’m banging 

on the walls because there are no doors. No windows. 

My loss is a fist-shaped hole. My loss looks like 

a thousand bloody mirrors. I discover who I am 

in a thousand different shades of red. 

There is something about one-sided dead-end 

relationships that makes me roll up my sleeves 

and push and try and fight. There is something 

about broken, emotionally unavailable people 

that bleeds a mother out of my throat. I’m tired of 

crying in the bald face of cold, unfeeling silence. 

I’m tired of standing knee-deep in a sea of my own 

surrendered needs. 

My mother is the kindest person in the world, 

but in my dreams she stuffs push pins into my eyes. 

My father’s fury calcifies in my chest, all brittle 

glistening rock, and that, for lack of a better phrase, 

sucks so bad. Everyone who ever hurt me is tired of 

feeling sorry about it, so I alone carry around the hurt 

like a dandelion seed tickling my chest. I carry 

my grief like it owes me money.

I tell my therapist, I don’t think I’d know what to do 

with myself if someone finally treated me well. 

If their love was boundless and free. I think it’d really 

freak me out. I don’t think I’d be able to hold it. 

I look down at my upturned hands and notice 

for the first time how small they are. How pathetic. 

I’m locked in a room with all my hope, and my feet 

sink into never-ending floor. My hope looks like 

a thousand velvet-soft Mays. My hope is wild-eyed 

and sticky-handed and unwashed, all sweat and grime 

and stain. My hope keeps me on my tiptoes. I face myself 

in all my sweetness and my still-birthed reality. I face 

myself and cut the hope straight out of my chest. 

Wanda Deglane (she/her) is a poet and therapist from Arizona. She is the author of Melancholia (VA Press, 2021) and other works.