Orbiting Bodies
In the pale hours of the day, I wait on you. The lights stay off as I drift from room to room. When the smoke from my bacon begins to billow, I open the window. At the peak of the sun, I push the mower across the lawn, heat smoldering my shoulders. But before all that, I sit on the porch with paints, mimicking the sunrise on the canvas before me. My hands stain burnt orange for you.
There’s one moment when we meet, just as the sun begins to set. Your drowsy eyes meet my drained ones, and our bodies intertwine. Head on top of head, blissfully serene. Good morning/Goodnight. Then, we move on, like celestial bodies on an immutable orbit.
“No time to lose.” We know this phrase too well.
As twilight reaches across the horizon, you wait on me. From door to door you move, flicking the lock on each one. When the light from the moon shines too bright, you close the curtains. In the darkest hours of night, you take out the trash, wind freezing your fingers. At the end of all that, you sit on the porch with pens, sketching criss-crossed impressions of the stars. Your hands stain deep black for me.
Our lives act as the axis of the Earth. Though our eclipse may only occur once a day, we find our ways. In every silent, syncopated footstep is a whispered “I love you.”
Everytime I see a body of water, I feel the immense urge to submerge myself
I think of myself as a stone tossed into the center of a lake. The surface of the water, like a thin layer of plastic, stretches until it breaks.
My rocky body, rough with calluses, is smoothed by a blanket of neverending feeling. The pressure cracks me, a sensation similar to my skin peeling.
Bubbling now as the remaining air in my body floats away with the tide. A foam forms on the water, made of little pockets of carbon dioxide.
I sink to the bottom of the lake, nestling myself into the sand. A faint beam of sunlight reaches me, caressing my corroded stone hand.
Reflect-
Thump, thump from behind me.
There’s nothing there.
A couple twigs fell
or a squirrel dropped an acorn
or a bird dropped its nest clippings?
Maybe
it was the ground itself,
cracking open
its muddy mouth to say,
“You’re here
with me.
Not there.
You have nowhere left
to hide.”
Emergency
Hope learned to drive when she was nine. There were no stop signs, and every light was green. The pumping adrenaline made every foreign mechanism look like her favorite toys. At eighteen, she was asked how she figured it out so young.
“Do you think that was the hard part?”
Cyclical
(Based on the art piece One by Brian Corr)
The orbs in your head roll across the ceiling
then drag along the floor. Trace
the oval with your
eyes. Don’t stop
following.
Breathe in.
Air rushes down your throat.
Rib cage stiffening, stretching outwards.
Teeth sharply cold like biting into ice cream.
Your diaphragm wide like an opera singer’s mouth.
Breathe out. Feel the warmth fall off your lips.
Your brain signals a warning to inhale,
recognizing the hollow void inside
as a gnawing hunger for air
like a cyclical
craving