A Forest With No Trees & Candy Apple Thoughts
by Charlotte Egginton
Johns Hopkins University
Charlotte Egginton is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University, currently studying Creative Writing and Romance Languages with a minor in Linguistics. She is fascinated by the approach to language in all facets, and uses poetry and fiction often as a creative outlet to further understand her own command of language. She hopes to become an author one day.
a forest with no trees
My mother was a writer, but until the day she died
She kept her life’s work locked away in a beautiful maple wood desk.
My father claims he never knew her secret until she told him, when I was twenty-five,
but I find that hard to believe––
the way his eyes passed over me with startling disinterest, even as a girl.
I was too different to truly be his.
Unlike my brothers, he never laid a hand against me
but I see that for what it means now.
At thirty, I count the hearts that beat with my own blood
(One, two, three)
And somewhere far away
A green shoot springs out of the dirt.
My mother’s desk lives in the bedroom of my house. My house.
It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.
I press my lips to my daughter’s pink fist, watch
her butterfly lids shut.
I place one hand on her chest
And her heart carves a rhythm into my palm.
But her cries are needy and strange.
Her hair is too light,
It isn’t brown like mine and something
Inside me splinters.
She wants what I won’t give.
She’s calling for her father, her father who is blue-eyed and fair.
She reaches for me, and I deny her.
She pleads with me, but my mind is on a graveyard
Hours and hours away.
candy apple thoughts
My grandma told me that getting the hiccups means someone is thinking about me.
I wonder if they’re whispering, or if they’re mentioning my pleasantness
In passing.
I feel kisses on my crown and a tinfoil ring on my finger.
Now my selflessness peels off of me in splashes,
In chunks of hair and skin and blood splatting on the bathroom tiles.
I’m too much and too little all at once.
Then I think about how
Everyone I know used to be a baby,
And their murmurs are soft and sweet and their eyes are flushed
And they need me.
Is there anything sweeter than a child reaching up?
It’s an eggshell innocence,
Like the prelude of rain;
That fresh chime of water on the greens and reds of fall, the moments
Before they must and rot.
Perhaps because it’s so temporary, that space between the rain and the wet,
Where everything is light. Tilling up the gasps in the concrete, pools of silver.
I know it’s silly to feel so jealous,
But for me, the mirror is a dark place. Even when I'm alone, I brush through my lashes
like someone is watching.
I feel myself aging like the leaves, dulling and mollifying
Concealer (shade creamy beige) separates
On my skin and creases into my crow’s feet and––
I must have gulped my ginger ale too fast.
Interview with the Author
What pieces inspired you to start writing poetry?
I was mostly inspired to write poetry through the influence of my professors in the Creative Writing department––their wealth of knowledge, their support in my own writing. If I had to choose one piece that inspired me to write these particular poems, I would have to say Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Amiri Baraka.
What theme do you find yourself constantly writing about in your works?
I find myself time and time again drawn to themes of family, motherhood, love, and self-perception. Particularly in poetry, I attempt to delve into wounds of my own past, in the hopes of being able to heal from them.
What do you think are important elements in thought provoking poems?
The most important element of thought-provoking poetry is, for me, the beauty of language. While the meaning is of course important in a different way, I find the sound of the words in a poem in combination with each other to be what I notice and look for when reading poetry. That, and an element of surprise in a poem.
What role do you think poetry has on our society today?
Poetry is incredibly important in understanding one’s own emotions, as well as understanding how we should and how we are interacting with the world around us.