ELISSA BLAKE
We lay dead beside one another. We await a sentimental soldier with whispering boots, to install our hands into a stiff, quiet clasp. Please let me hold you. Please let me hold you. We talk and the wind autocorrects our words with maggots in our windpipes. Wishful manages to become wistful. Replaceability becomes spilled blood. Fire becomes rapid oxidation. Things become twigs, thugs, thighs. American Exceptionalism becomes Exceptional American Jam. We memorized the peanut- butter and jelly sandwiches forged by our mothers. What is the difference, we asked, between jelly and jam? Most mothers shrugged. Yours wrote a thesis. Jelly is fruit-blood. Jam is fruit-guts. Your eyes are the color of apricot guts. Your eyelashes are seeds. We laugh, side by side, about bottle caps and constellations. I say, when you were littler, littler than this, the only phenomena you cared for were blues-rock, archeology, and me. We are about to become archeology, sweet thing. We pollute the soil, dye it red, make it Mars, our own lovely Mars, like a redwood house painted red. I say, I wish the revolution had stopped, I wish the industrial revolution had stopped revolving before the butterflies turned gray. We grow silly. It is that time of day, that era of sooty sunshine. Our noses tickle and decay. Do giraffes need Life-Alert? Now, now, I say, that is just too silly. No, really, they can never, ever get up again! We cannot get up, either. Perhaps we are giraffes! Yes, we concur. We are both giraffes. |
Elissa Blake is a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a member of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars program. She is also a member of the editorial staff for Spires, Washington University’s intercollegiate art and literary magazine. She has published pieces in Spires, Moledro Magazine, Brown University’s The Round, Navigating the Maze, Polyphony H.S., Forest for the Trees, and Sonoma State University’s Zaum. She plans to continue writing throughout college and beyond, provided that the vast abyss of adulthood is merciful.
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