#true mistakes

[bluewillowmoon]

“I love to examine

that distance

between me and what I desire.

It sparkles. It hurts so much. It smells great.

It is full of needles.

It looks back.”

— Lena Moses-Schmitt, from “Powder Down,” True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025)

[bluewillowmoon]

“I long. In longing, I elongate myself. And oblong, I touch everything.”

— Lena Moses-Schmitt, from “Powder Down,” True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025)

[bluewillowmoon]

“Why can’t I stop

saying the word heart? I’m trying to

touch it, the cold heart, the sun

that allows for all my disastrous looking,

the exhale, the wind inside me that blows

the tree backward, but I am the paper.

I hold it all in,

I fold half over you.”

— Lena Moses-Schmitt, from “Dear Future Me #4,” True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025)

[bluewillowmoon]

“When do you sense you’re finished?

How do you know you’ve begun?”

— Lena Moses-Schmitt, from “Opening Questions for God or the Artist,” True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025)

[bluewillowmoon]

“Inside my own body there is memory

of the body I used to be.

The one that woke early

& skated for hours in the cold white rink.

What a gift each day to depart the self

& turn into something else—

able,

hours later, to change back again

to the same person everyone thought I was,

though at sixteen almost no one is who they think.”

— Lena Moses-Schmitt, from “Not Happiness,” True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025)