Poem of the Week: 7.18.24

"Affirmation"

AFFIRMATION

by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

Divination of the dregs. I'm very forgetful 
& you remember you only need yourself 

to hear coyotes bay the night's dead
to grow into someone else by moonlight.

At the sundown park, I see behind a tree
lovers licking matching mustaches, petals 

following breeze, between breath & grin
shuffling palms sway what they want. 

I try to remember: make sure you are so 
in love with your life that a partner is a treat, 

but never a necessity. If only yesterday's coffee
tasted better 

---

---

This AI-gen image is so funny to me. How did it get this from “leftover coffee”??? Idk but I love it. You better feel like this when you read my poetry or I have failed.

On the way home, I watched a rom-dram.

Past Lives (2023, A24) perhaps deserved more than the tiny screen on the headrest of a Boeing airbus, but it was a stellar movie despite the constraint. The film’s plot concerns what we gain and lose when we let things go, and the idealistic nature of love and loneliness. Its been lingering with me.

Apparently so too has coffee, as this is the second coffee-centered poem I wrote. A few years ago I didn’t even drinking coffee regularly. Huh. Anyway, “Affirmation” is like a mosaic or collage in my mind: I wrote many of the individual lines years and miles apart, but tried to assemble them here into a poem about waiting too long for love to feel like love.

It’s a poem I just put together, and I’m not sure if it’s finished yet—more? or less? or another way?—but I will try to embrace the movie I happened to catch on the way home: embrace reality.

Diviningly, Ricky