After I am safe home/Come Back Different

After I am safe home

after the neighbor’s forsythia

staggers me with yellow
stars I thought I’d never see again

M. tells me

you cannot stand between someone and the world

while they are stabbing you in the back.

The love I left was dying and almost killed me
was sometimes a man and sometimes a boychild
and sometimes a girlchild and sometimes god themself.

I blurt out, god, the price I'll pay
for those tiny brilliant stars you made is to stop

being the one that breathes for you

and M. holds me
and that is a prayer too

and both are true.

She tells me
because she knows I need to know
that the lilacs three streets away have yet to bloom.

When she tells me, you will feel this way for a long time.

she means the lilac filling my lungs
will feel stolen from yours

and that saving my own life is still a sacred act

and that is a prayer too
and both are true.

Come back different

(or not at all)

I miss you.

how you'd stop to visit every Tuesday and snap a stem or two
to put in a flask you called a vase

I'd only last a week
—maybe two
if you kept trimming
and remembered to change the water

you'd whisper to me (slowly dying)

how pretty I was
and how lovely (lonely)
I looked in your home

(both are true)

until you'd find a petal —maybe two

and couldn't decide if you should

clean Them up or throw Me out

When M. finally brings you home,
I hope you look different (snapped)

or maybe you've learned;
the stars aren't meant to be bottled

~ Angelina Benitez

Hear Come back different read by the poet, here.

~ Sarah Vickery

Hear After I am safe home read by the poet, here.

Meet the Creators

Sarah Vickery

Sarah Vickery facilitates the Ipswich Poetry Group and hosts Zumi's Open Mic in Ipswich and Topsfield. A fundraiser by day, she has deep roots in activist and artistic communities in Boston and the North Shore.

Angelina Benitez

Angelina Benitez (she/they) also known as "she moves and makes" is a dance maker, visual artist, and now poet working in the Greater Boston area. She graduated with a B.A. in Contemporary/Modern dance in 2018 from Salem State University and continues to make dance through The Click, a Boston based dance collective and teaches at High Street Studios in Ipswich. In their sparse free time you can find them polar plunging, embroidering, or meditating in her back yard. Stay in touch @shemovesandmakes on Instagram.