‘Original Thought’

Ziyue Hu

Original Thought

Eventually, we stop talking.
It’s become pointless.

We stopped allowing ourselves
the truth a long time ago.
We’ve replaced it with

a comfortable couch
and screens full of nonsense,
most of them saying,

not like this, or, oh you’ll see.

We are guilty before
we’ve even had an
original thought

forever.

Marie Anne Arreola (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net nominee) is a bilingual interdisciplinary artist and journalist whose work engages speculative lyric, digital culture, and diaspora memory. She is the founding editor of VOCES, a bilingual platform amplifying global writers and artists, and a Rotten Tomatoes–certified critic. Her writing appears in over sixty literary journals across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.