The Shit We Don’t Know

The Shit We Don't Know

by Nicole Farmer

Call it the dirt swept under the carpet
Call it the miracle of stardust stuck in the marrow of your bones
Call it the secrets your parents kept from you

Whatever you name it, there is simply so much unknown in this life.

Like your mother telling you she had two daughters she gave away
(whispered on her deathbed)
Like your father's days turned into months in solitary confinement
(a natural storyteller mute on this subject)
Like the mystery of a perennial plant turning green again in the spring
(a resurrection uncelebrated)

And truth?
What is truth?

It's the web your front porch spider spins each night, fresh with the dew.
It's the dreams that do not vanish after we wake to a new dawn.
It's the small death we experience every time we hiccup.

I am infantile in my ignorance,
childlike in my wonder.

Nicole Farmer is a reading tutor living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Closed Eye Open, Quillkeepers Press, Capsule Stories, Sheepshead Review, Roadrunner Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, Great Smokies Review, Kakalak Review, 86 Logic, Wingless Dreamer, Inlandia Review, In Parentheses, and others. Nicole has been awarded the First Prize in Prose Poetry from the Bacopa Literary Review and has just finished her first chapbook entitled Wandering Not Lost.