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Alone
Sometimes
you have to be alone to feel.
Alone in a crowd is
the best place to weep,
don’t ask me why,
it’s got something to do with the acoustics.
Then the moon,
not silver dollar but
ripened orange, touched my cheek.
Smears moved
across the surface,
dragging the dirt from its craters
like crying.
Below, there was a layer of
eerie
midnight wonderland—
like gothic cotton candy
The smoggy cloud cover
shifting among itself,
slowly,
tossing the orange breadth of
the moon from canyon to canyon.
The parts of the clouds
not illuminated do not exist,
black moving
on the black of the sky.
The moon, breathing ever-out
with the syllable “mmm,”
the woosh of a bathtub faucet
just switched on,
the fan left on overnight,
the toilet flushed
down the hostel hallway
at three in the morning,
The moon touched my cheek.
We all learn about religion
the same way,
but we all learn
why people are religious
alone.
For me,
I learned
in aisle 35.
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I wrote this poem in the window seat of an airplane. I was crying, travelling alone. The scene imprinted on me because I felt so incredibly lonely in a space so packed with people, but also because of how beautiful the sunset was. I was caught between the vastness of the sky and the crampedness of the airplane. I hope this poem encourages folks to reflect on their own odd, lonely moments--maybe moments when they realized something.