after everything, forgiveness is time moving forward 

‍in a smoke cloud, i see all of this and more— 

you drink root beer and list all of the places you don’t need to see because we are old and beach roses grow over the miles and miles we ran together, feet aching, laughter caught on the wind 

cards fall from the table, game of guess who, half filled glasses, sometimes when i think of us
i feel sad, even if our memories
live in the golden light of the kitchen, not tangled in telephone wires 

there are many ghosts drawn in the shapes of letters;
like so many before me, i watch them dance as the dog
sleeps and whimpers beneath a blanket away from ghosts and i do not see us among them 

at home, we turn on a rerun as it snows outside, as letters find their place in rusty mailboxes 

later, tv off, i write letters i will not send: 

dear dad, i love you. you hurt me. i am learning to forgive even as our family cannot be the same. 

dear me, you’ll listen to the same music wondering if it’ll sound the same as when the city first sang to you; you’ll tell the same stories over and over,
but the people who love you won’t mind. 

to my first childhood dog, i kept my promise;
i didn’t die. 

to the lone wolf howling in the night, someday someone will respond. 

in the city, we went to a record store with all of its old and new,
torn covers and glossy discs, lyrics came back to us as the songs played, 

scratching, crinkled, soft beneath the chatter,
memories torn at the edges, but holding together all the same still i’ll never truly know where you’ve been— 

what it was like to lay beside him and have him forget your name,
to love the ash of a cigarette against your tongue, to drink bitter coffee over and over
knowing you don’t like it, to taste cranberry and alcohol at the start of the morning, to wander
aimlessly 

as a form of escape, lace a future with diamonds,
to write without metaphor, ice everything but the wound, repair the kitchen table your parents
broke, 

to look in the mirror and
recognize everything about yourself; 

still— 

i know what it is to listen to a song for the first time
and fall in love before it finishes, to find tears mixing watercolor, to run in every direction but
the right one, to lay in a field and let go, 

to hold someone closer than i’ve ever tried to hold myself,
to stop wanting to count stars but speak each constellation’s name with care, as though it
were my own, to know 

‍after everything, forgiveness is time moving forward 

‍i’ve seen all of this before 

Published 5th March, 2025.

Emily Anna King completed her MA in Creative Writing at UCC in Ireland and is currently teaching Creative Writing at an international boarding school in Western Massachusetts. Her debut poetry collection, The Dog with the Flute in its Mouth, was released the previous fall. She has publications with Howl Literary Journal, Tír na nÓg, Massachusetts Best Emerging Poets 2019 (Z Publishing), Pamplemousse, Lily Poetry Review, Paragon Press, and Otherwise Engaged Journal.