By Daniela Garcia

When we rested on the grass, his figure endless amongst the infinite green

I felt the need to pray, for what, exactly, I didn’t know

I tucked you into my pocket along with your scraps of poetry, kept since our

Shared, glittering tweenhood,

Hoping the brilliance I once saw in the mirror wasn’t fleeting

And I’m sorry, Caroline, I should’ve prayed more

You wanted purple-prose and you wanted midnights,

Honey-soaked mornings and bouquet of flowers you didn’t know the name of,

To witness the cold kiss of a tear leaving his eye

Roaming water pooling between the ribs of a shared home

It spilled into the garden and out the driveway

The way you loved clung to the air, once,

Heavy like cologne by the pool-side

Driven with need in the wake of your youth

Rolling in the underbelly of summer,

The heart curling into droplets, a second skin–you danced with it on

You drank the sun of august and suckled on clementines

The slow spit of the coming-of-age, bubbling like drool down the spine of your days
Blue powder and freshwater on your face–I saw you, in the gloaming, endless

Spring spoke to me then, thunderous in the aftermath, voice like a garden of lungs,
“Dance,” she said, disembodied yet warm

But I couldn’t do it, not like you could

Like the sheepish brush of hands in the winter,

Fevered and crooked; I had grown cold

Contractually tethered to that little square of blue that hung above me,

I couldn’t see past my mother’s wooden spoon, or the map in her hands

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I told you, then, “I need to grow up.”

You forgot to pack a bag but left the next morning anyways

He asked me where you went–now and then I loathed you,

I wanted to compare scars again, to see if the blood had dried around yours

Or to see if you were doing anything this summer

You left your love letters, unaddressed and undelivered, under my bed

When I think of the way you loved, and find I can’t touch that which I feel

Caressing curved ink, needlessly delving into the starlit wound

A star burst open, your heart pearlescent;

And it had been a year since you were cut open, and another since you opened
your mouth