Ellie

17

Keep Your Love Notes

You were a magic wanderer,
ambling through space.
“You were one who licked the horizon and took gulps of the sky,
swilling the stars and heavens around in your mouth
You said it tasted like incense and love letters left unread. “

You wafted into our realm
of the ordinary, the banal, the vanilla.
Your arrival needed no announcement,
because the air turned electric
and the ocean became still.

Listeners swam in the richness of your voice,
and drank your body by the quart
hoping to distill you too an elixer (nectar)
saying:
“She sounds like velvet and looks like secrets, let’s keep her and make her dance.”

So you evaporated on a Thursday afternoon,
disappearing as seamlessly as you came.
The weight of Expectation was a guillotine blade,
which you could not take, it drove you away.

We put you in chains for our own awe and shame.

Once gone, I scoured the earth for scraps of you
needing to prove that I had not just imagined you.
Happening upon dried flowers and wrinkled love notes
you kept to get you through the winter.

Sister, sister. I still reach out for your cheek
in the nighttime when Sleep
has slipped out my window and into the night
leaving me wide eyed and stirred
enveloped in empty space and robbed of sight,

I miss you
I miss you

So here I sit on the floor of my coffee roasted kitchen
and I read your diaries in the summertime,
sitting in a puddle of nauseating silence
in that same place where you
once you told me what it was to taste the sky and swallow stars.

In equal parts sinner and equal measure sage
here are my vices,
take them all away.

But catch these words before they slip down the drain,
before they are rendered worthless by a magic-less brain.