Vic Nogay
Synth
in the far then, when this life got hard, or
felt wrong,
i used to dream about the lives i’d left
and what they could have been if i’d stayed.
a fantasy of color, burning in imagination
backlit
by a falsehood of realism in gray.
in the near then, i’m grown,
responsible.
i can pick apart the bodies of my burning loves
and their conflicts,
rearrange their limbs until
they fit
better, and use my burnt black fingers to draw a map
to a place i have never been.
both far then and near then
held a
space for self-silence—
an other-reliance—
but now
as the world booms in dissonant synths,
as the colors bloom,
backlit black, neon new,
i see all of me. i hear none of you.
—Submitted on 09/03/2020
Vic Nogay‘s poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Daily Drunk, 433, Anti-Heroin Chic, Versification, and other journals. She grew up in Ohio and attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She is an agent at Columbus Humane, an animal protection organization in Columbus, Ohio. Twitter @vicnogay.
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