Where Have You Gone?, Nicole Tallman

Mother, every night is like walking in the forest alone.

Dark, strange world without your voice,

But I hear notes of it in own.

Small ghosts of your eyes

Live in the gold flecks in mine—

A signal you still inhabit me.

And the same lines of time

Net my neck to remind me

As I crouch closer to your age:

How I just might surpass you,

How I just might wilt first,

How one day I won’t recognize our faces anymore.

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Nicole Tallman is the Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review. Her debut chapbook, Something Kindred, is forthcoming from Southern Collective Experience Press. Find her poems in Wrongdoing and trampset. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @natallman.