The Poetry of Place

The Poetry of Place
serves as a space
for the worlds
I’ve held inside
the ones that kept me alive.

​

I write not
from a place of pity,
but from a space
of immense joy.

​

My identity was shaped
by cities I didn’t yet live in
a mirror of who I was
before I even knew them.

​

I took my first breath
at twelve,
on a train bound for Chicago,
Lana Del Rey in my tears,
longing thick in my chest,
as if she

the city
was calling me
home.

​

And when I left
her lights,
I returned
new.

​

But I wasn’t home
not yet.
So I built the city inside me.

​

In the low hum
of a small-town café,
in the glow of a window at night,
in the jazz song that played
I dreamt of her.

​

I listened to New York jazz bar playlists
in Midwest cafés.
I made vision boards
and maps of escape.
I romanticized my chaos.

​

I crafted The Poetry of Place
so I could keep dreaming
so I could escape
back into her lights,
and feel like myself
again.

​

Folded into memory,
stitched into the clothes I keep,
the scent of a train station,
the corner of a photo
my stories are kept.

​

Through sound,
through fabric,
through the fragments
I’ve gathered along the way,
I trace the lines
between where I am
and where I’ve been.

​

The Poetry of Place
serves as a space
for the worlds
I’ve held inside
that I now
release to you.