Which they hate about us

A Poem by Isabella Triana

You’re reading Good Grief. We’re glad you’re here. Enjoy this week’s original piece!

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I'm in the mood to boil over. 
To slow-burn, to blow out 
candles, to make-believe 
I wished for one wild dream. 

I’m stimulated by superstition, 
the way it can crawl up through
a crowd and hide itself away, 
a plastic baby in a king cake. 
All of a sudden: a superior slice. 
Good luck can only glow when it's 
backlit by the bad. I wished for 
the right slice. I shouldn't have 


told you. I wanna be a good sport
 when I win. I wanna pretend it’s 
not about winning, that my part-
icipation in the process was the
real prize, that i've found strength
through all this conditioning. 

Tell me something I don’t know, 
I say. I’m from here. Which they hate 
about me. I’m faking this yawn, which 
spreads to the wide-open mouths of 
the boring people, boring themselves 
into oblivion, which we on fire at them 
for, flailing and flaming about, 
which they understand to be yawns -- 

We're taking up the wide-open spaces, 
making noise with our wide-open mouths, 
burning out, which they say is why they 
couldn't see outside themselves, 
past the burning bunch of us. 

None of us saw the pack of wolves 
out back, wide open mouths screaming 
and crying and howling. Legend says 
the wolves just left us there, kept on 
going. Which we think says it all. 
Which they need to see to believe. 

It's always political. Which they hate
about us, because their politics say 
so. We hate them for that. We've 
agreed to let the wolves pick sides. 

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