it’s heat wave season again, and all of my friends
are leaving for better things. we skipped all the phases, ran straight to desperate while the rest of the Catholic school passed out in the basement.
i’m not hungry enough to ask, hana, but you’re leaving me in the desert with bottle blondes, with these fucking kids who can’t even say our names right.
the week after you went missing for four days we sat on the floor
late-night lazy, knees drawn, our bodies washed clean on comforter covers. pillows in disarray arranged over
YOU’RE WORTHLESSYOU SHOULD
D KILLYOURSELF NOW EVERYONE H
hangul i couldn’t read. back to english ALL YOU DO IS SLEEP AND EAT
you said parents couldn’t get it out of the whitewash.
your bed pushed against the bedroom wall, an open window.
somewhere, birds are singing.
put the pillows back, baby, keep an ear out.
we’re just in the desert now, sweetheart.
somewhere, there’s snow.
one day this whole thing will be memory, dog-day hazy
it scares the shit out of me that i’ll forget:
four years of summer camp, sunlight,
blood in my mouth. searching and destroying.
we spilled blood and boys and badmouthed good names when we got angry. your vomit in my arms in april. party clothes we were too nerdy to drink in. the worst winters in the desert, holding your hair back,
we come out of the bathroom, rub red noses.
kiss the fire off of your eyelashes, your dry skin. hungry mouths twin exit wounds. you can hold me like a person
or a grudge.
someday we’ll see snow. but that day we won’t remember this.
it’s a road-trip, two girls: breakfast at midnight,
we’re making pancakes (they’re not good). press the scar
until it hurts. what’s done is done.
my patron saint of death threat jokes, scholarships and
sharp teeth. bright blue sky season will come
for you, my green light baby, my plagiarized clichè.
the last rainbow of a biblical cleansing.
cradle the dying thing like it’s holy,
while we sit still on the floor and
deadpan.
what do we know of exit wounds, anyways.
lap the last of the blood off of your fingertips. someday we won’t recall this summer. you’ll see snow before i do, but we aren’t yet in august.
Campbell Brown is a queer, mixed-race young writer from Arizona. She likes homeric epithets, Oxford commas, semicolons, and em-dashes; she hates self-writing these bios because she’s scared of sounding pretentious instead of quirky and cool and like the funniest smartest sexiest person alive oh god please help. Find her on Instagram and Twitter at @p0cketwatch3s.
Comments