97

My favorite muse

I endlessly write about you

Rag wrung dry

Threadbare dirtied cloth left to romanticise

Yet somehow I find a clean edge to grasp

Tiny foothold on my fingers

Jolt of current

I miss you once again

Face a blur

Dream-like being, elusive wind

Kiss of nature

Raindrops on noses

Paned glances

I stole all your Fridays and you pickpocketed every other second of my headspace

From that year and every moment after

But I am grasping at straws to remember

Snapshots of the good

The 3am document and text

Words you'd never admit, lost in a wisp

Deer in the headlights

Another firefly inside joke

That blinks on and fades

With your cellphone's blue light

---

Lilac

lied because you were plastered over every wall of my teenage years

left with the sticky residue of memories and autographed posters and polaroids

blue tack wads marketed as temporary

watermarks on white paint, pale yellow like whiskey bottles

and everything with you felt like glass, so fragile, so impenetrable

ice cube

crunched under your teeth, bubble wrapped dreams

crumbs of chocolate chip cookies and your sandwich order

littered over a wooden bench tainted by that ten-hour conversation on your sixteenth birthday

told me you loved your life here but desired more

than my quaint tiny girl world and all that my ten-dollar allowance could offer

to buy scuffed sneakers

pink nmds by my ugly tapered sweats

barely lucid now, strangled vignette

migrating from the glow of pale yellow fairy lights to being

tacked to my laptop till the day i graduated

held onto a promise of return

i was at the airport that day because of you