Golden Shovel: Famous Prophets
After Will Toledo
I want to offer my apologies
to the here the there to
the pasts presents and future
I’ve shunned the me’s
out of their selves and
filled that space with infinite you’s
mostly imagined, but
I can’t imagine they’re fake, I
couldn’t do that, I can’t
stop to help
my old self pack her bags, she’s feeling
empty, dejected, empty, empty, empty like
wanting to be human, like we’re
exiting through
mountained pages, the
notebooks I left discarded, ripping
pages and pages of
odes to self, the
boxes I covered with oceans of tape
exclude every word that hurts
I need space left for my
toes, my neck, my ears
my middle knuckles, in
moving boxes that stay stacked in my
new home, left for years,
gathering dust and I’ve
never tried to open them, but never
moved them into closets, they need to be seen
or they’ll die or burn but if anyone, anyone
observes their walls they won’t quit
this earth, they’ll remain quite
content to rest like
stones, something the version of you
I invented could never do
Biographical Note: Birch Saperstein (they/she) is a poet, knitter, and freshman at Kalamazoo College. They write about the fact that squirrels dig holes they don’t put nuts in so other animals don’t take them and the fact that self-seeding plants are called bisexual and other things they learned when they probably should’ve been sleeping. Her work has previously been published in Angel Rust.