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There will be no stagnation

There will be no permanence to our blues

There will be no mourning of the dead while we're still breathing into our bodies

This poem is having none of that

In this poem we are still becoming

Some days we're the little boy in class being punished for staining the front of his school shirt with a bruised mango

And some days we're the grown man in his gray couch happily licking mango off his hands

Our hunger is so ripe everyone wants to feed us

The whole world is our playground

We're old enough to not be scared but not young enough to have no cares

We gulp down sadness as though it were fresh air

We think we're burying our grief but we're only rehabilitating it