In this life,
I was very minor.
I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.
I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.
I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.
I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.
I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor Buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.
My poems were not major
enough to even make me
a “minor poet,”
but I did sit here
instead of getting up, getting
the gun, loading it.
Counting,
killing myself.
Olena Kalytiak Davis
From “The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems”
2014