Tied on a beach seen from above illustrates the poem "Good"
Photo by Austin Neill / Unsplash

Listen:

For a while there was a mantra and it went like this. You are equally capable of hurting and being hurt. You are equally capable of healing and being healed. You didn’t of course believe it. The hurt part mostly. Day after day, you sank to your ankles in the eddies of your decentest intentions. You do not have to be good, a poem said. But you did! You did. You did, and you wanted to be good, and you wanted to be good. Still you glanced sidelong. Still you wrung, clung, harbored, balked, and spooned transgenic soups from the borrowed pot. Still your longing swerved. You were equally capable of healing and being healed. You were equally capable of hurting and being hurt. The tide trickled ravishing around your feet.

Robin Myers
Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Her recent translations include Dolores Dorantes’s Copy (Wave Books), Mariana Spada’s The Law of Conservation (Deep Vellum Publishing), Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche (Open Letter Books), and Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro (Coffee House Press). Her poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, The Drift, Poetry London, The Yale Review, the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, and other outlets. Follow her on Instagram @robin_ep_myers.