June 7th, 2011 - Lisa Folkmire
Back when it was repetitions
of “liquor before beer never
fear, beer before liquor never
sicker” the summer of graduation
parties and the bullshit advice
we tried to give each other before
we left the nest (so to speak), I
guess I was the queen bullshitter
as I stood up and read the graduation
speech that I wrote and thought while
I gave it “I don’t actually
know what I’m saying or why I’m
saying it” which has been, admittedly,
a lifelong problem, and also
I would like to add the real
advice to give any high school
graduate who may be prone to
such antics is to drink your water
and pace yourself, but you learn that all
if you choose to drink on some old
carpeted floor in a house with
some almost indiscernible
sign tacked on the front of it. Leaning
up against a couch suddenly
wondering what your parents are
doing but knowing you’re too drunk
to facetime them so instead
you live in the present and then
a few years later maybe you’ll
move back in with them and get a job
working retail while you get a
graduate degree in no
bigger-nightmare-to-your-father
than poetry and then suddenly
you have that degree and you know
it’s time to shine but turns out it’s
a hard business to crack but
you’ve always had some luck, and a
customer gives you a lead on
a job with full pay and benefits
(or bennys as you’ll eventually
jokingly/eternally deem them
once you have them and can joke
about these things because life and
all of the possibly detrimental
decisions you’ve made are no
longer crashing in on you) and
then one day when you are sitting
at the job, you realize
that you are in fact happy
to work to live and not live to
work, unlike what you always said
you wanted, and somebody will read this and say
I thought so much more would happen
to you (warning: this type crops up
often and isn’t warned about enough)
and you will remind them that you’re
still young and they’ll say almost thirty
and just remember that after you
drink your water and pace yourself
to also get offline for longer
periods than you think necessary
because that in fact weeds this type
out and when the pandemic
hits and they say go create something
beautiful what they’re saying is make something for us to judge
and at the end of the day you’ll
just buy a house with your love and
adopt a dog and spend one too
many moments worrying about
what else you’re doing wrong, but you’ll
have the job and an upstairs full
of books and you’ll keep yourself on
a steady track of reading and
writing and when you look at it
all, you’ll still be excited for
the day you do all that you once said
was possible on the podium
on the stage in the ceremony
and maybe something you never saw
coming because at the end of
the day, you’ll never really know
what you’re saying (at least not at
almost thirty), but you do good
things anyway, or what you hope
to be good, as in being kind
and understanding you and the
way you fit into the great big
system and all of its own tiny
and not so tiny fatal flaws.
Lisa Folkmire is a writer from Warren, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts where she studied poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Mantle, Glass, Barren Magazine, Alegrarse, and Okay Donkey.
Lisa encourages you to take a few moments to learn about the Ruth Ellis Center.