How You Belong in the World

how you belong lacewing
by James Diaz

You can find lacewings on warm nights
taking away what we don’t want
feeding on aphid honeydew
microscopic antlions clearing the fields
like mommas with bad brains
tossing babies into dumpsters
by the freeway at night

but I wonder, in our kingdom,
who gets to decide that sort of thing
who among us is wanted
and who just gets tossed to the bottom
of the satchel

even if you always were such a difficult child
harder to love than the rest
and maybe it’s true
that through generations
we’ve become too sensitive
to know how to survive
without love and care,
but I don’t care about all that

these two things matter;
what should have happened but didn’t
what did happen but shouldn’t have
and if a man or woman isn’t wanted
is in the way of the great clearing
I want to stop that kind of world
from seeming normal
I want to put the brake on its heart
my feet through a hole in the floor
of that damn car if I have to
I’ll drive us into a wall
but I will not settle for two types of people
those who matter and those who don’t
I just won’t.


James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and editor (along with Elisabeth Horan & Amy Alexander) of the anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma (Anti-Heroin Chic Press, 2019). In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and prison/confinement. His work can be found in Yes, PoetryThe Collidescope and Isacoutic*. He resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life.

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