The first thing that struck me about Kaija Ra’s poem is how it feels like a text message, or a caption on a disappearing story. The date is part of the title, like a timestamp, and the lines are short, almost breathless. It’s a modern kind of confession, posted in public but feeling intensely private. When I read it, I don’t picture someone in a dusty library; I picture someone typing this on their phone, maybe in an airport or sitting in a car, watching an actual LA sunrise. That immediacy makes the heavy subject—guilt—feel different. It’s not a weighty, medieval guilt. It’s a 21st-century one, dressed in the glitter of a “barbie LA sunrise.”
We read a lot of older poetry in class where guilt is a dark, brooding thing. In Hawthorne’s *The Scarlet Letter*, Hester’s guilt is a literal scarlet ‘A,’ a mark that isolates and defines her forever. But here, the speaker says “Goodbye / My guilt / I stepped away on sunshine.” The guilt isn’t a mark; it’s something you can just walk away from, and you do it on a sunny day. That’s what feels so strange and compelling. The backdrop isn’t a gloomy prison; it’s a beach, a dance floor, a Barbie-pink sky. It’s the aesthetic of escape, of the perfect Instagram life. The speaker is trying to outrun their fault by immersing themselves in everything that looks like freedom and fun. “I gonna fucking gone guys” isn’t proper grammar, but it’s proper feeling—that frantic, determined push to vanish into the glitter.
I think that’s why the last three lines hit so hard. After all that frantic energy, the poem stops short. “But fault / Is co- / moon.” The word “comoon” breaks, just like the thought does. You can’t outrun it. The fault is as constant and recurring as the moon, present in “any bloody lifetimes.” The contrast is brutal. You can have all the sunshine and dance floors in the world, but this specific guilt, this fault, has its own orbit. It will come back around. It’s not a dramatic, soul-crushing weight; it’s just a fact, as plain and inevitable as a lunar cycle.
This makes me think of another poem we read this year, Ra’s “I’m a ghost, but I throw great parties.” That poem also lives in this space between vibrant life and a haunting emptiness. The speaker there is a social ghost, present but not truly *there*, using the noise and light of parties to fill a void. It’s a similar strategy to the one in “My Guilt.” Both speakers use the trappings of a hyper-real, colorful modern life—the parties, the LA sunrise, the dance floor—as an antidote or an escape pod. But in both poems, the strategy fails. The ghost is still a ghost. The fault is still a moon. The glitter is just a surface, and underneath, the deeper rhythm of the self, stuck on a loop of regret or disconnection, keeps ticking.
Reading this, I don’t feel like I’m being taught a lesson. I feel like I’m overhearing a truth I already kind of know. We all have our versions of trying to “step away on sunshine.” We bury a bad feeling by diving into our friends, our phones, our plans, curating a version of our lives that looks shiny and complete. This poem matters because it admits, in its broken, texting shorthand, that sometimes the shininess is just the route we take to run away. And it admits, with the quiet certainty of that hanging “moon,” that some things can’t be outrun. They can only be carried, even into the brilliant pink of a sunrise.