My name is Charlotte Abotsi, and I'm one of the curators of Ours Poetica.

And today I will be reading the poem "Attending the Party" by Hieu Minh Nguyen. I selected this poem because as soon as I read it for the first time, I instantly wished I had written it myself.

It is a poem that is so honest. It is a poem that feels familiar. It is so vulnerable, and I really think it's just written so beautifully.

To justify another month of solitude I tell myself, despite my instinct to stay inside it'll be good to exhaust myself of the world. Outside the yellow house on Portland Avenue I kick the slush from my boots ascending the empty porch. Even if I'm wrong & the light beyond the door is a light to nowhere I can still say I tried, at least for a moment, to live outside the warm parameters of my loneliness.

I can't stop thinking of the old man who'd salt and shovel his walk, clean & precise every morning & how the neighbors growing suspicious of the jagged terrain of his driveway, discovered weeks later, he'd passed away in his sleep. But here is a world where the people I love gather in small rooms with not enough chairs. How lucky I am to be missed by those who have run out of ways to hold me? & isn't that what I always wanted?

To keep something perfect long enough for everyone to notice when I'm gone.