DO NOT LOOK BACK DO NOT LOOK BACK DO NOT LOOK BACK

By Abigail Scott

First Place Winner of the SNAPS Poetry Contest

DO NOT LOOK BACK screams God but I look back anyways because Orpheus and Lot’s wife and Psyche and I all share the same disease.

They are standing behind me, funhouse copies stretching back into mirrored eternity, and as one we turn.

The scholars, deep in their leather armchairs, huff about romance and tragedy, but they do not realise the fundamental truth.

(they are often the same thing.)

You cannot love without also breaking yourself a little: without sacrificing something else. The scales must balance. The score must be settled. But Justice is easily bored, and so sometimes she lifts her blindfold and fixes the game.

After all, fairness is a lie we tell ourselves to make the horror palatable, to make it lie down and growl at us from the shadows instead of stalking out into the light in all its gory reality. Thudding heart, constricted breath, rabbitting pulse these can be symptoms of many things. Seeing what cards you ’ ve been dealt does not make you sure of what the dealer holds.

This creeping rot I feel? This sickness crawling up through my belly and twisting around my esophagus? It is not love, though one could make that mistake easily enough. No.

It is doubt.

That most subtle neurotoxin, that vicious, sweet-tongued seductress; mankind’s shared hamartia. The sense that you have been played. That everything you have yearned for, struggled for, bled for, is nothing more than a stage play. That this is a comedy and you are the fool standing alone at the end, surrounded by the cackling masses here to enjoy your failure.

So I choose. And, petrified here at the crisis point a tall, glittering monument to my own weakness

I can see that I chose wrong

Ambiguous Blessings Ambiguous Blessings Ambiguous Blessings

By Ameena Abid Second Place Winner of the SNAPS Poetry Contest

There are some blessings that can only be realised ( see: understood, observed, appreciated) in retrospect.

Certain scenes can only make sense once the movie is over.

The sermon can only be written once the shock becomes heartache, and the heartache can be dulled.

We can ( I can) only make sense of the loss once the wind that blew open the door to our perfectly arranged room has stopped howling.

Is the air still enough ( yet) for meaning to be made.

Certain ambiguous blessings only make themselves known once we ’ ve swept up the dust of our former lives, once we ’ ve rearranged our rooms, changed our walls from beige to blue and put the books back on the shelf knowing it could all come down again.

I glue the pieces of a tiny ceramic house back together again and place it on a different shelf. I begin to forget how my place looked before—

—before the wind hit before the books fell before the little house was tossed to the floor.

I let myself build in the Land of After.

And I let the Land of After deliver me an understanding that did not appear at the scene of the crime.

I let myself believe that there are in fact lessons to be had, ambiguous blessings that will fade in like polaroid pictures but in years rather than minutes.

I let myself make sense of blurred images. I believe these flash cuts fit into a larger storyboard.

I let myself believe these jagged little rocks are in fact gems that will be worn down and made to shine in time.

I let myself believe these ambiguous blessings are in fact blessings that will become less ambiguous with time.

And even now I can see that what I felt at 22

I was not ready for at 18.

And I understand that there are certain lessons that could not have been understood had I never had my heart broken

—had I never had the tiny house tossed to the floor.

There is an empathy

I gained that I did not fully possess in the Land of Before.

I thought my room was safe from the forces of chaos that tend to sweep up others.

I thought with enough planning and care, I could prevent the wind from blowing the door open.

I understood sorrow but I did not understand loss, not until the tiny house fell. And though I am tempted to trade it all back for a little more time in the Land of Before,

I know that sometimes what we want is unwillingly forfeited for what we need. And that in time we learn to love those ambiguous blessings that were needed to build a home in the Land of After.