Hallucinating Humans in Hypothetical Houses
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
FLOWER
You, a flower,
A cherry blossom
Temporary and beautiful.
The suns beady eyes stare at you
As you break into a sweat.
Your petals, so loosely attached,
Fall off your back, exposing your thin spine.
I constantly follow you, picking up the severed petals,
In hopes of reattaching them to you.
My clumsy hands will pick up the bottle of Elmer’s glue
And shakily press the pastel skin against you,
Willing it to stick.
Maggots feed off the hanging flesh
Of your open wounds, but you pay them no mind
You have more pressing thoughts.
You’ve been pulled by your stem away from your roots
And you feel
Homesick.
As you grow, your stem will fade
To a sickly shade of brown as you try to resemble
Your home soil.
Eventually, you will shrivel into a spiral,
As if acquainting yourself with your leaking insides.
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About the Book
Sometimes I convince myself most of my memories are fake. I read once of people who were in their thirties who found out they were actually in their forties. I wonder if I have been lied to about my age. You might call me paranoid, but your memory doesn’t fully kick in until you’re about three, and even after that your thoughts still aren’t coherent. So it is very much possible to not know your own true age. Sometimes I speak to you just to say things out loud, and I think you realize because you won’t respond. Since we’ve moved into this house, I can’t tell if things have become more or less clear. I don’t know if I know what is going on any more than I did before I met you. Most of my life right now is spent in a comfortable confusion, with you as a lurking constant. I was told to pick up writing, so I’d be able to read over what I wrote and decide what’s real and what isn’t. I’d be able to find out what’s really going on. But the thing is, when I read over it, I’m not sure what happened in real life and what I made up. This is the story of us—you and me. We are unwell, and our fates are undecided. I found you on the side of the road however many years ago, and here we are. Between my hallucinations and yours, reality has become a joke, but we’ll laugh at it together.
About the Author
Linda Ahmed is an Egyptian American poet from New Jersey who has been writing poetry since she was in middle school. Her love of poetry began as an outlet, a way to express moody teenage angst. But it grew into a love and passion for the craft of poetry. In this collection of poems she reflects on the people she’s met, the opinions she’s formed, the struggles she’s overcome, all written in a dreamy haze of hallucination and imagination. She hopes others see their own growth through these verses and find their own meaning in the fog she’s created.