a broken wishbone’s jagged half cuts the soft space above your nails as it hovers from the compost pile, leaching a dream from your skin. summer’s dawn crests with the soft wind, with the bloody warmth and the sun’s refusal to set until nine, your swollen hands resting against the tile. the days stifle you—the hours are heavy on your shoulders—but tonight is open and boundless in all directions. your grief is unending but so is your love and your grief was for love anyway. you want her. you want her badly enough that you’ll ruin the poem. you want to touch her, salvaged salvation, her hands gentle on your bruised, barren skin. in the dream you don’t admit to yourself she holds you, listening with attentive understanding as you talk about the coiling darkness of outer space. and you are a writer who does not resort to clichés like seeing the stars in her eyes (it’s the kind of thing she would mock in biology), so instead you look at her and ponder the vestige of chance that permitted your meeting, a mathematical improbability if not impossibility, punnett squares cancelling out over generations until you were allowed to look at her like this and wonder what the insides of her eyes must look like to be capable of this expression. you can’t figure that one out but you weren’t much of a biologist to begin with, which is why you’re writing poetry about her eyes instead of analyzing them. moon song is shaking your laptop with its volume, the sound permeating the air and drifting out on the breeze, drawing on the ears of mythologized neighbours, old friends, boys with broken hearts, the woman who lives across the street and always confuses you for your sister. the night is young and tender and alive, a conundrum of adjectives, and your sugar-soaked heart is torn and pulsing. did you ever hear about the boys by the creek casting rods and missing fish by the skin of their teeth? did you ever hear about the girl with a song tucked into her chest that you are only now letting yourself listen to? did you ever hear your own words, sharp like pine needles, piercing through possibility you were frightened of? you do not hear at times, being the way you are, which is to say suffused with grief. which is to say love redeems you. which is to say that as a writer you are used to inventing your own realities, so why can’t there be one where you kiss her and you blush all the way home, why can’t there be one where the sting of his lips is replaced by the balm of her chapstick, why can’t you set your fingers against your pulse and push until it slows again? your biology textbook would suggest that this is not an effective remedy, but once again you were never the scientist and your fresh and aimless hands are looking for a place to rest. the sweat coalescing between your thighs and ribs is a blessing. the disappearance of this chill means release, means home, means sitting in the dark surrounded by people who understand with electric jubilation coursing through the particles clinging together to form skin. you aren’t much of a chemistry student either, but you won’t let that stop you. everything in balance, right? this much sorrow traded for this much hope. you watch women glance at each other’s lips, you watch a woman walk away from her wedding, and you drift into the story yourself. you cling to the part where these women run away and you never consider that they always return to their men. they are stapled to the margins of your mind and the centre of the screen, he’s the axis of the story but to you he’s an afterthought. for a while you thought you could do that. you could be the slavic immigrant’s daughter with the nice boyfriend, lined up for a mathematics degree, you could be everything your daddy wanted you to be—except happy.
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This is incredible!!! Your writing, the imagenery, the tragedy. Admirable!! ,he’s the axis of the story but to you he’s an afterthought‘ i will be thinking about this line for the rest of my life now lmao. Thank you for sharing such a profound piece of writing, it resonates a lot and I‘m still perplexed by the sheer beauty of your words, you‘re so extremely talented!! 💌