[239 words]
I slipped back into twenty-nine and a half,
the air syrup-thick, everything smelling like chlorine
and plastic dreams. I was supposed to be
someone by then, but mostly I was
a person who hoarded notebooks and never bled on the page.
Some nights I rehearsed sincerity in the mirror,
other times I stared until my face
blurred into wax — skin slack as if memory
had started to forget me.
I drank spiked seltzer and smoked out of hunger
for interruption — the difference
was a thread I couldn’t stop chewing.
The man beside me was kind and not
the one I loved, but I liked the way
he asked if I needed anything from the vending machine.
I remember my thighs spit-spiked to the vinyl chairs,
the TV playing a documentary about jellyfish,
how they pulsed like lungs underwater,
translucent prophets with no brain and no regret.
I thought about leaving at dawn and
driving until the horizon unstitched.
There was always a version of me
waiting in another city, crouched
on a box spring, folding my name into paper birds
and feeding them to the dark.
The motel light lacquered everything in fake gold —
even the future, sagging at the seams
like a postcard soaked in seawater.
The broken-toothed rasp of the AC made me
want to write poems that stung like salt.
The road was out there, hum-low and slick,
a secret with my shadow in its mouth.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, Josephine Quarterly, Meniscus Literary Journal, and Stanford University’s Mantis among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
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