Scales Painted Like Fingernails In An Array Of Cobalts, Blacks, And Periwinkles Danced Around Me In Reflections

She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.

Sometimes when I have a dream, I feel entirely refreshed of my old perspectives. I see everything brand new, as if I’m a different person. What relief. I know now why our minds wander in the fields of the twilight hours. To abandon the stagnant pond misery we wade in and remember possibility, endless as always.

On the Photos from Gaza

She screams, but her mother can't hear her. She's only inches away. But the soft, floral blanket caked with dust is heavier than the broken concrete that used to be home, than the missiles that stretch out cold metal arms to dismember and destroy, than the guns young men tote in old men's wars. It holds her mother's dead body in a vice-grip, but there is no grip tighter than the girl's on the blanket. She screams harder. She wants nothing else than to lift the veil, between life and death, between her and her mother, but it is too heavy. It is too heavy for a little girl who only wants to be with her mother.

If I pull the dagger out

What will be left of me

I am blood unspilt, nothing more.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.

There is a kinder world within all of us, but we must agree to be as kind as it is to see it.

We see each other’s Instagram posts.

But we don’t talk much.

I know what he thinks of the current administration. He likewise knows what I think of it. We play music on the car radio and sing along, not saying the words aloud.

I hear the posts on his phone undulating like neon gelatin, sugary nothings calling to him. A mixed bag of nuts that instagram feed, one post is an ai cat driving a semi and the next a cry against the white identity under attack in America. They’re both for my father. The algorithm knows him better than I do, he listens to it more than his own daughter. Our conversations are rarely in words.

He has women up in his garage, I covered them with grumpy cat pictures when I was only a girl. Make it lighthearted, make it fun, my objection to his sexualization of women. Why am I so eager to cater? I am a woman now. He has maga hats now, Trump ornaments up when it isn’t even Christmas. On the other side of the ornament is a mirror. It’s poetic. I keep turning it around, putting Trump’s face toward the wall and the mirror toward my father begging him to look. He turns it back around. How can I look at someone when they cannot look at themselves? How can I speak to him when we never have?

There’s so much I don’t say

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.