I like to watch streams
flow into other streams
and those streams
flow into other streams
like I’m drunk.
I like to blame
Eve,
that foolish girl,
for my misfortune.
For my lack of a
doting husband,
a praise-worthy child,
or even a pet to help pass time.
For my stupidly puffy cheeks
that no man could love.
For my stringy hair
that makes me look
fifty
instead of twenty-five.
Why,
I ask the streams,
why me?
Why do I have to
shoulder her blame?
Why me?
But the streams,
keep flowing into
other streams
Again
and again
and again.
Ahja Hawkins Ahja Hawkins is a 18-year-old living in Gretna, Louisiana. She attends the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts as a Senior. She loves reading but has a bit of a book-hoarding problem. Ahja loves to write poems and essays about the Black experience, and hopes her work can resonate with unheard Black voices. She’s the regional winner of Poetry Out Loud, has won a silver key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, received runner-up in the 2024 Patty Friedman Writing Competition, and won third place in the Pinkie Gordon Lane Poetry Contest. She’s been published once in the Fall 2023 issue of Under the Madness Magazine. Ahja is passionate about performance poetry, and dreams of traveling across the world to share her work.
