By Audrey Valentine Weisburd

Oh, how I want to love the world
rather than fear its snarling mouth,
sharp words and violent machines.
For when it drops, it becomes me. 
Plummets. Stomachs turning
in my soft, weary body. 
Crooked postures, growling shadows 
from the man in the hole on the corner,
how his jaw hangs ajar as he throws
that wet, tangled web of invitations
my way. His spit – when it drops, 
it becomes me, like the bang on the window
of the bird’s hopeful body, I long for a room 
half-outside, half-inside. 

Safe, with no ceiling.  Loved, with no end.

Show me how to hold hands and skip 
around the quicksand, around the great circle
of all that could happen at any fragile moment.
How to shrug off a stranger’s bad news. 
To be drunk without thinking and low
without puddling. How to stomach the storm,
the process, the inarticulable cycle
and find its dangling mysteries
delightful, like a windchime.

But after all this time, I fear 
the random and the desolate,
the rough and the delicate,
for the raw may be spoiled 
and the packaged might be fake.
But I want to love the world, 
the same world I’m told to fear, 
conceal, contort, and rearrange for its eyes.

I want to dance by myself through the dark streets at night.
Buy the man in the hole a pair of shoes.
Save, replenish, restore and forget. 
Build a parachute and glide over a rippling sea. 
Go to the party wearing nothing and leave 
with a brand new name. Live
inside of an umbrella. Hear 
the hail ricochet. Feel
the rhythm of what matters, 
the pulse of what’s true, and distinguish, 
with great ease, what is not.

Audrey Weisburd (she/her) ’25 is a Television, Radio and Film major and a Creative Writing minor. She has wanted to be a writer her entire life and found a love for lyrical poetry through songwriting as a teenager. Audrey loves to watch movies, read short stories, and write in the late hours of the night with a cup of peppermint tea beside her orange cat!