islands

one

It’s cold in her house and still she feels herself burning up. It’s in the unnatural skip of her heartbeats, in the restless race of her blood. Everything is on fire.

She wants to run a hundred miles or sleep a hundred years. She wants to kiss someone, kill someone, wants to devour someone whole. In her head, words are twisted up in thoughts are twisted up in stuttering uncertainty. She is humming with confusion; she can hardly speak.

two

The brightness of the day comes as a shock to her--when she steps out of the coffeeshop she walks into the sun and marvels at the strange flow of time.

It's only much later that she startles awake in her bed and remembers that it's all due to the simple fact of daylight savings, that it is not some magical hiccup that takes this one day and turns one of its hours into gold. But she thinks that Daylight Savings was Sunday, and she went to visit an old friend on Sunday night—ducked into the house at six o'clock, in the fullness of light; returned to her own unfamiliar door at seven, having waded through the dark between their houses—

She has understood the magic but not quite; the feeling of a wrinkle or a small mistake lingers.

three

How do you write poetry?
You don't, it writes you;
you don't, it writes itself;
you don't.

(you press hard on your skin with a silver pen-tip,
twist. the verses, they well from your veins.)

You eat. You sleep. You wake. You try your best to live.

four

dear best friend,

in my imagination, you're one glorious person who is beautiful and brilliant, who intimidates and inspires me, who takes up an enormous, wild space in my life that I wish were actually filled.

sometimes I wonder what I did wrong. how did I miss you? maybe I've already met the person who would have become you, and just made some mistake that drove them away. sometimes I think about that empty space and the way it echoes.
I'm afraid, you know, of my future without you, without the one person that everyone else seems to have. I am afraid that I am going to crumble someday and I will have no one to turn to.

but there's a part of me that thinks that you are actually many people, who have fitted themselves into the many small cracks in my heart. I don't think anyone loves me like I think you would. but there are many people who love me a little or a lot or somewhere in between.

five

You're eight years old, and you've always wanted to be a soldier. Now you are.

You're eight years old and sometimes, sometimes you feel eighty, because the weight of the world rests on (a mother) (a father) (a little brother) (a baby sister) (you) a family that needs more faith. Sometimes you're tired. Always you're afraid.

But you've been raised on fairytales, stories about brave warriors and the castles they defend, and you think to yourself, I must be a stronghold. The world is full of cannons and you are just stone--but you're a tough one, aren't you, and in your books, you read about medieval walls twenty feet thick, and you build the same around yourself.

six

"Do you ever--"

The wind turns your nod into a shiver, and when she turns to look at you—her eyes are strange in the dark—the dark is strange in her eyes--your gaze skitters away from hers and you nod again at the sidewalk.

Her hair is mercury in the moonlight, her voice light in the cold air. Somewhere in the words there is the hint of a smile. “But I didn’t say anything."

seven

it turns out that people can be whole and smooth and covered in soft unbroken skin and still be ruins on the inside, burrowed through by worms and old hurts until they blacken and burn and collapse into themselves

it turns out that people are like peaches or peaches are like people and it is hard, when you grow up battered by heat and storm, to become something sweet. nature is not gentle. people and the peaches swaying on the tree outside my window are small and hard, tinged with a bitter twist.