Girl, Fifteen, To A Lover She'll Never Meet by angel-in-pieces, literature
Literature
Girl, Fifteen, To A Lover She'll Never Meet
Thursday nights are silver screened.
At nine, it's time once again to air
the prelude to a dream.
I wait, eyes square, for the immaculate
contours of your face to appear:
the features of a lover I'll never meet.
It seems strange to say
(a kind of admission of defeat),
but to be honest I'm OK
with the pause, rewind, replay
that makes up our relationship.
You have to admit,
knowing I'd never flip
channels or walk out when
you're in a scene
is a devotion, of sorts.
I expect nothing in return.
I know you know nothing of me.
But I can't help but love you;
your close-ups, your scripted smile,
the way you lean towards the screen
After the wet season, before
the midsummer night's drought,
I flight for the floodplains, where
the northern downpour bleeds out
and sweeps its love to the mouth
of my lungs. I sleep in the crux
of an oxbow, let my dreams flux
and flow fractured, deltaic. For this
is the way I piece myself apart,
a resolution, my absolution
in a new avulsion.
During the day, I move south
towards the river mouth, picking
pebbles, coral fangs from the riverbed.
A loose tooth is a common truth
in these parts. Bones are febrile,
eyelashes are made of chalk, salt.
Tears turn brackish. They cake
and crack on the flats of my hands.
This is my Pang
It is Akhet, the season of sorrow and silt, and Set
must tense his sandbreath against the slick of wet
once more. It's always the same: though he's unsure
who started the game, or whose face he wears,
he knows he must prepare for the beginning of the end,
the bite of night and all the slippages in the inbetween.
And he swore he'd bait their breath,
but they'd rather choose death than fear,
with their tombstone legs, arms pegged
in sockets and their locked ears,
burying themselves beneath blocks
built to the sun. They outrun him, every time.
It's a crime. He remembers what his mother said:
do what you're able to keep them faithful
.
It is time. We feel the pull of summer along our spines
as we head into hibernation. Bed is short respite for our leaden limbs,
our singed hair. The air aches with the wait of it, where the embers
click and sing like crickets. Snippets of sound from the underground.
"This," someone says, wide-eyed with awe, "is what the insides
of the earth look like" - the world beneath, struck through with
dragons' teeth, pocked with open sores. The slit smile of the crater
in a slack jaw. Our scarred skies are littered with lights, many
mechanical suns spun into the ceiling, glinting like electric sequins.
And in the middle of it all, where our