Tempest By Alyssa Trivett

(Inspired by the band Driveways song “Tempest”)

As you rattle off or bed,

don’t dig up bones of our failures.

Be it with a plastic beach sand shovel or a plastic fork from the diner.

Let it go and it shall die.

And in Spring, it will bloom

into something new.

Kicking off any spiderwebs from my mind.

I may not be the same of whom I was

before I ran through this

and hell tried to drag me to it.

The tempest does not define me. It is only one “you are here” on life’s map, a temporary plot point, as a matter of fact.

I will emerge , unscathed.

I try to keep his ghost in the basement of my mind, of everything he and I had.

I drive away from Midwest air

to breathe the ocean line.

The tempest tries to draw near, and even when the memories rubberband retract on I always claw off and back to the present again.

Alyssa Trivett is a wandering soul from the Midwest. When not working two jobs, she chirps down coffee while scrawling lines. Her work has appeared in many places, but most recently at Ex Ex Lit, and Duane's PoeTree