Prose and poetry by Leen Raats
I'll just have to learn to live with it
said the specialist who casually diagnosed an illness
which he didn't explain, which I had never heard of
but from which I had been suffering for years
and that maybe it was partly my own fault.
I shouldn’t have been so eager to live.
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We are made up of layers.
Like this landscape that
reads like an old book.
Crooked apple trees with names
reminding me of a song
that hasn’t echoed
over these hills for a long time.
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When my mother died, my heart shrank
to the size of a pea.
A blue whale has a heart the size of a small car
with arteries you could swim through, but it beats
only twice a minute.
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Grief is feminine. I greet her, an old acquaintance
with whom I grew up, grew askew
who pulled at me my entire youth, dragged me
into a bottomless darkness. So often I fell.
Sometimes I would lie there, paralyzed by a fear
that seemed to come from nowhere, and yet so real.
L’enfer c’est les autres but hell is heaven
compared to what sometimes rages in my chest.
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Influencers without influence are looking for
the hippest hashtags for their Tiktok videos
dancing to the beat of the algorithm.
Incompetent experts by experience
whose unfinished projects grow too fast like children
give TED Talks about the power of failure
with a voice like the melody
of a lonely pinball machine.
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It’s the music that saved me
on long days underneath the roof window
of a drafty row house on a street
where no one wanted to know me.
At night I dissolved into crowds
like sugar in coffee. Invisible
but everywhere my shadow slipped
along facades, over thresholds where riffs
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Leen writes 