a community garden, which is of course what i wld think about when i think about poems
& poetry & while i felt that, when Sandra wrote that a poet could walk into a room saying, hey you guys, I wrote a racist poem & another group of poets would pop up just to say, hey is this poem
really, uh, racist? . . . i felt that hard, but also what about when Amy tells us to take our little internet feet to go read someone’s poem & what about when Chen posts a picture of himself in a beautiful neon bright gloral button-down & what about when Roy wrote that them speak
ing Spanish to their family won the Dem debate. it’s moments like those that keep me near this weird fire & trying to figure out if i can continue on here without getting swallowed in flames or if maybe instead i shld start making some smores. like i said, i like to imagine it as
a community garden, which is to say i like to imagine Devin at The Olive Garden talking to waiters about their favorite poems & i like to imagine Khalypso the Poet being their best Leo self unfuckingapologetic about their joy & i like to imagine every flower in this garden is not
named for a type of niceness, but each one has a different name that translates to a kindness in all the different languages we speak. the TL;DR is that there’s so much crap in this place, like steaming piles of bullshit, but couldn’t we use it all to fertilize some kind of, idk,
some kind of garden where we could all grow & be poets & be poems & just grow like so much fertile earth? i’m dreaming of a garden that’s called a could we? could you? could you find me there?
N.B.: References tweets by Sandra Simonds, Amy Poague, Chen Chen, Roy G. Guzmán, Devin Gael Kelly, and Khalypso the Poet. Each stanza until the last one is exactly 280 characters, the standard limit per tweet on Twitter. The poet would like to add that this poem is not an endorsement of the corporation of Twitter and furthermore, that the poet endorses no corporations.
Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet from Newark, New Jersey. Author of the microchap, Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press 2019), her poems and book reviews live in such lit communities as Cotton Xenomorph; underblong; The Rumpus; and Glass. A recipient of fellowships from DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Sundress Academy for the Arts, she is a co-editor for a forthcoming anthology of immigrant and first-generation American poetry whose proceeds will benefit RAICES. As a high school English teacher, she believes in kindness, semicolons, and that ICE needs to be permanently abolished.