I confuse cigarettes with fireflies
for every evening spent in search of you:
the way they flicker is one and the same,
and both buoy up and down,
down and up,
one on wings, the other between fingers
of Podunk people
on sagging, Podunk porches;
the problem is the first can be collected,
but the latter must be caught,
the first can spoil the heart and lungs, but
the latter eats through time and that I haven’t got –
you’re missing,
you’re very-missing, over-the-moon-
and-in-the-Milky-Way-missing,
and you’ll be dead and gone,
if I decide to up and never look.
Fireflies brood on the handlebars
of a bike that isn’t red and isn’t worn
and therefore isn’t yours –
though I trip on my own heels and check
for your baseball cards crimped between the spokes –
and the sky folds over everything,
buckling under purple light and navy strokes
and fluffy drifts of pink – you would have called it chalk smears
until the devil left the details
and blurred it all to black, to night, to the green
of the mosquito lights
under which we spit our seeds and breathed our hose water in,
lived on simple, silly things.
My mother says it’d be better if I rested on my knees,
if I took a break and gave a dime to get a dime
of that cheap, powdered lemonade kids sell
before they grow into their bodies,
but I insist I’ve got to keep going, going, going, or
you’ll never end up found;
she says I haven’t been the same,
that I must have loved very-missing-you,
if I keep searching behind hedges
that roam and bloom and break,
if I keep stewing in this habit of burning fingers
and sighing out your name,
under halos of ash,
of Menthol smoke and forgotten memories.
I promise her, she’s right, I’ve changed with the solstice,
with the fattening heat,
and I loved you, I love you,
I’ll love you – my sneakers’ soles, they pare away,
and the bugs we caught
now roll on their backs, withering to singes
at the bottom of the glass;
lemonade expires in grubby, paper cups
as children like me grow into new skins as children like you
grow out of old ones
and go missing, over-the-moon-
and-into-the-Milky-Way, dead to cul-de-sac rounds
and those sweaty, neighborhood block parties,
kept alive by a game
of look-and-seek, of forgetting to remember,
then remembering to forget.
About the author: An avid reader and rising college student, Ariel Dantona has been writing since the age of eight. Having just finished her first novel, Up They Grew, she also enjoys writing poetry, screenplays, and film critiques, and has a penchant for the avant-garde, horrific, and socially taboo. Her style often utilizes stream-of-consciousness narration and gritty description, with a focus on human nature, the supernatural, and societal satire.
