In our apartment in Newark,
the cockroaches laid eggs
inside my Polaroid camera,
just another symbol of how insidiously,
Delaware took over my life.
I struggled to want it, for you,
to repay you for being the only person
who had ever wanted me,
who had ever looked at me and seen
someone who was worth wanting.
But in the end, I couldn’t do it.
I bled onto the grout in the bathroom floor.
I swallowed the pills and unplugged the phone.
I packed my things and shut the door behind me.
I never used that camera again.

11/01/2011

Author's Note: So, I was inspired by a friend of mine, who's been posting these poems lately with state abbreviations as the titles, and I thought, I could write poems about the different places where I've lived. The thing is, of course, that if you follow my poetry, or you know me, some of this stuff is going to be familiar to you, and I'm not trying to repeat myself, just trying to get a solid picture of what each place means to me in my mind. Anyway, I lived in Newark, Delaware for two years. I moved there to live with my boyfriend, Rasool. We met on the internet when I was nineteen. I turned twenty-one shortly after I moved there. Newark, Delaware is, for those of you who don't know, a suburb of Philadelphia, and the location of the University of Delaware campus. So fairly well populated. And I'd been living, previously, on a farm in Indiana, and previously to that, halfway up the side of a mountain in the Appalachian region of Kentucky. So, culture shock. I never really got over it. I hated it there. I cut myself a lot while I lived there, and I eventually tried to kill myself with sleeping pills. So that's how Newark worked out. I was miserable and then I fled.

Posted on 11/01/2011
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