See you all in ten days.
Reflective Convalescence
i.
The orange light whispers against edges of invisible nightingales on the lawn. Painting about the bulb, its bursting text shore across their wings and cut embers in the feathers. Obsidian splashes with a dim glimmer, sprayed wet with holographic dawns - a reverie stitches in my every dream.
ii.
I want to tell someone that I am nothing and I am this: a cascade blur, something that flashes holy in the nighttime or no one at all. I have thought about how I am absent from people’s lives. Can you imagine how many lives I have bypassed? And I’ll pixel their meadows with roaring hymns (in my head) and they might be possessed by a glorious chorus.
iii.
The antelope’s print cuts
static into the mud at the bottom
of the lake. It is hot,
caked with years preceding and forwards,
and the tiny hopes
lost in liquid flickering.
I am the mayfly
who has watched it travel
to the other shore,
saw resounding circles echo
with every step in its path;
hail storms infinitely.
iv.
There is a truth in dying. Listen to each of my breaths as I distance myself from the beating in my own chest. I like the way people look at me when they want to save me.
v.
I’ll be waiting for you on the other side of daylight, scratching my palms for their lines to fall off, reasons, reasons, reasons. Daydreaming at the edge of a pool, x-rayed by the brightness vanishing between sense and consciousness; I will be dunking my head into the shallow end with my eyes wide open. I’ll be dragging my face across the liner. I’ll be waiting for the thorns to grow from the roses adorning my eyes. I’ll be waiting to become invisible and black and endless, just like those crying molecules outside.
Peer outside and let your gills taste the warmth of summer midnight and feel it brush. If you are silent and you let the silence be your guide, you might hear screaming. You might hear the birds flying, burning, alive.
I am trying to get there, too.
Writing About Love
O, when your fingers tremble in the silence of night and morning and underneath safe ceilings and happy lights, that is love. O, when your stomach reaches to grip your esophagus and bring it to center hope, and that is love. O, when alone in darkness or light, or explosion or peace, or water or fire, and grins pour out of you like rain trying to be stopped, that is love. O, when there are no other words left, that is love: that is love like no other. O, when you shiver to see her, that is love. O, when you wish to scream to the heavens that it is love, that is love. And in the heart of all that is life, even in tragedy and fear, when you feel there is sunlight someplace in the eyes of a beautiful girl, that is love.
That is why I have looked into your brilliant green eyes and told you in the anticipating quiet that I love you, because I love you beyond all things, and nothing will ever change that. You have given me life like nobody ever has. That, in every essence, is love.
For you.
Sometimes it is good to remember things that have ended. Nine months ago, I was in a different place. And it was one of the best things to ever happen to me.
Christina’s World (1948); Andrew Wyeth
I love people with stories. I love people who have been hurt, who have moments that remain with them forever, with mystery and a great peace about them.
I don’t want to be the first chapter anymore. I want to be Chapter Two, and I want to take them someplace. A place that Chapter One never even imagined. I want them to see the stories in me. And we can be new together. We can watch each other be written.
"In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone."
Percy Bysshe Shelley; “On Love.”
I sink under celestial lights milking above a rooftop I rely on. I don’t think anyone loves me. And I want someone to love me, but I am now afraid of love. And the flashing pastel breaths grow infinitely into a continuum with the dark. And I think I just want someone to sit beside me silently, because it is hard being mortal. I am flooded with the obligation to exist, and it crashes against my lungs, but I am just alone.
There are rose petals in places other than the garden. There are half-smiles and girls with perfumes that swell up in the rain. She doesn’t realize it; he is laughing because he loves it; we are all tiny pebbles and we fill the seams, we dry the oceans, we cut the wings off every sparrow we see.
There are portraits on yellow walls, dancing with colorful strokes that memorize a moment. And there is a “once upon a time” somewhere inside of you (and you and you and you) and you’re trying to pluck it from the freckles in your eyes. Sometimes you find it in the eyes of that boy who lives like he doesn’t give a shit. He gives a shit.
And so a broken glass fragment grinds with the reflection of the moon and it is greygolden; you feel like smoke and you touch your skin to know you’re real—that’s poetry. Poetry glides through these flickering images, and in that final moment, you know you are real.
—But maybe it’s a little bit more than that.
Proud to be part of this wonderful project. This is my submission.
