Photograph by Amy Hart
i.
Today I tried to talk to the universe,
but it sent me straight to voicemail.
Said its inbox was full.
Suggested I try again after
“the heat death of the sun.”
Cool.
ii.
My therapist says I catastrophize,
but honestly?
Have you seen the potholes out here?
They’re shaped like unsolved childhood issues.
I keep stepping into both.
iii.
The barista asked for my name
and I panicked and said “Jimmy.”
I am not Jimmy.
He wrote it with a heart over the y
and I felt seen
in a way I was not prepared for
before 9am.
iv.
I’ve been trying out mindfulness,
which mostly means
noticing how my thoughts
race like feral raccoons
loose in a supermarket at dusk.
They keep knocking over the cereal aisle
and whispering
“buy the frosted one, coward.”
v.
My phone screen keeps telling me
“You’re all caught up.”
But that feels like a threat.
Caught up to what?
Capitalism?
Existence?
The version of myself who flosses?
vi.
Anyway, I’m outside,
beginning again,
knees humming like old machinery,
jacket smelling faintly of
regret and laundry detergent.
The streetlights flicker on,
like someone upstairs
just remembered we’re here.
I wave.
They don’t wave back.
i.
The water in the womb
has a consciousness.
Which feels rude, honestly－
even the amniotic fluid
has been taking notes this whole time.
Meanwhile I can’t remember
where I put my EMF-emitting airpods
or why I walked into the kitchen.
ii.
They say we get birthed twice:
once as an idea inside our grandmother,
six months marinating like a celestial dumpling
inside the woman who hadn’t even had the opportunity
to pressure her unborn daughter into having a child as soon as possible.
And then again,
the formal release date,
the big premiere.
Limited theatrical run,
then straight to streaming.
iii.
So maybe this is why I cry at weird times－
in line at CVS
or when I see a seagull wearing a plastic necklace.
It’s not me.
It’s the ancestral waterlogging.
The womb-soup memory.
Grandma’s heartbreak swirling around in me
like glitter in one of those cheap snow globes
you shake and immediately regret buying.
iv.
They tell me trauma doesn’t start with me,
which is such a relief
because I already have enough hobbies
and “intergenerational pain archaeologist”
was not on my bingo card.
But here I am,
brushing dust off old stories
that were written before
I had a face.
v.
Learn the stories of your mother.
Which sounds easy
until you realize
your mother is basically
a nesting doll of every woman
who came before her－
full of unopened mail,
unfinished dreams,
and the kind of grief
you only whisper about
in grocery store parking lots.
vi.
Still, I try.
I hold her stories gently,
like they’re wet leaves
that will disintegrate
if I press too hard.
I want to know
the shape of her sadness,
the architecture of her joy,
the exact moment she realized
she was more than the things
she survived.
vii.
And sometimes, late at night,
I imagine the three of us－
me, my mother, her mother－
floating in the same warm dark,
our memories glowing faintly
like deep-sea creatures
that have never seen the sun
yet somehow know exactly
where they’re going.
Know that there’s a quiet hierarchy
that crowns darkness as the villain－
we are shaped in the dark,
cradled by it,
and someday the dark takes us back,
the arc of our existence
bookended by shadow.
viii.
Maybe this is what healing is:
teaching the water
how to forget
what no longer belongs to us
and letting it remember
what does.
Lucy Siegel is a writer based in Brooklyn, currently querying her debut novel. She has been writing for many years and is passionate about exploring themes of personal transformation and the complexity of the human experience in poetry and prose. Her work has been featured in Superpresent, Half and One, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal.
“These poems are interested in how the personal mind ricochets through late-capitalist daily life while carrying much older currents underneath: intergenerational memory, bodily ritual, the quiet ways we learn to cope. They lean into comedy not as deflection, but as a form of intimacy－an invitation to sit with discomfort without flinching.”