{m}34 Artist Spotlight: Noreen Ocampo

Noreen Ocampo (she/her) is a Pilipina American writer and poet based in metro-Atlanta. She is a literary associate at {m}aganda magazine and also writes for COUNTERCLOCK and Marías at Sampaguitas. Aside from writing, she enjoys playing Animal Crossing and rewatching Pride and Prejudice (2005), and she studies at Emory University but is with her kasamas at Berkeley in spirit. Say hello on Twitter @maybenoreen!

content warning: following poem alludes to sickness

“green thumb”

What day is trash day? I wonder,

even having lived on this new street on and off,

then on and on and on, for a year now.

Maybe I should say multiple years

because these days, each day births a new revolution

around the sun. Each night, I lie in bed aching from the journey.

How unnatural it is to replace

one’s own mother, even temporarily, and then

attempt to replace one’s own father in half a week’s time.

I have been twenty-one for twenty-one days.

I have not yet prepared

for the healing that life dares to require.

In the backyard, I eat fog for breakfast,

untwine a bouquet of roses hanging upside down

and meticulously tied. My mother helps me preserve

any flowers I receive so that the feelings given with the flowers

will survive the green of life, will survive even after

the original feelings have died.

The fog has eaten at my roses, their petals damp

and resaturated with false life. A full bloom breaks from the bouquet

before I can think of how to heal a wound that

does not lend itself to healing. I want to ask my mother

how to save what I have killed twice, but all I can do is wait and see

if the next revolution around the sun will forgive me.