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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
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      • Thank you, please come again
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        • Foolish Lemons
        • I Know Icarus
        • nightstand as self-portrait
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        • Pasiphaë
        • Poem for a Stranger
        • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
        • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
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        • Year of the Frog
        • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
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 Fall 2023     Poetry 

Among my Greed

Malia Ropati

Taking, not replacing

things I never need

What I can’t see is my blinding greed

trying to feed on a feast with a full belly

where my eyes search outwards and never inside

because it hates what it sees so again it proceeds

to consume without looking behind.

 

Look what I have. But look at the world.

No but look at where I am. No look at the road.

I’m starving off this delusion

Because I know it’s not enough

When I had nothing, I searched for something

And when I had everything, it disappeared

so I see things that aren’t there

and I’m back to square one.

Unable to stomach the truth

And see with no vision

I pass the same sign

And still make the same decision

 

Among my greed, I circle around

like a dog without a leash

without a nose but still a hound

A fat demon with a small mouth

Bound to no bound

Sinking to no ground

Every thought to be found

But no action to free itself.

 

I lost my home. My friends. My family.

Everything but my appetite.

And when I lost myself,

I asked for a map

You said I could borrow

with a marked location for me to follow.

I knew I was loved and I knew You’d share

so I continued a path all in Your care.

But soon my hunger grew

and I swear that I knew

where the destination would take me

Because it’s the greed

It’s my greed

that let me believe

no map could deceive the path You laid out for me

So I ate my way through just to see if I could

make it on my own so one day

I won’t ask for anymore

and ask from anyone.

but I do wonder

I do wish to know

why I’m still in the middle of nowhere

why I’m back to where I’ve begun

 

After counting the stars and calling for more help

I sit at a cave of what looks like an empty shell

finally able to look inside.

Oh God, I ate myself.

Among my Greed

Boyce Road

Celestial Infatuation

Firebird Suite No. 2

ganymede

Liars

Moonbeams

Sacred Rituals

The Difference

The Honor of a Dance

There Are No Phoenixes; Ergo, Ashes Are the End

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